ITunes discrimination



  • @morbiuswilters said:

    @belgariontheking said:

    @El_Heffe said:

    Using iTunes -- in any language -- is TRWTF 
    I disagree.  A better program for dealing with very large (23000 song) music libraries I have never seen. 

    Winamp user for years, but my collection outgrew it.  I use Zune, but that's only so I can play the music on my xbox 360.

    As long as you have no DRMed music, go for foobar2000, the media player with the most misleading name. Apart from supporting most media formats imaginable, very customisable and having a non-retarded volume normalization feature, it's a hell of a lot quicker to load up and search with. Other points in its favour is it's not a web browser, podcast downloader, video player, Gnutella client, online recommendation service or trying to sell you music.



  • @morbiuswilters said:

    I've heard a lot of people complain about how iTunes handles extremely large music libraries (70k+).  It's related to the fact that the metadata database is stored in XML and so opening it for the first time can take quite awhile.  I don't use iTunes, though, so I can only comment on what other people have stated.  I just use some custom stuff with a standard directory layout.  It scales quite well.  :-)

    Which makes me curious. See, when Psion introduced EPOC32 palmtop OS in the late 90s, they provided a very basic RDBMS with the OS. (It can't JOIN, yet you can execute queries via C++ as well as SQL) Basically, a 4 MB PDA with its own SQL database server process running in the background. I would guess that Symbian OS still has this available.

    Firefox for a while has stored certain user data in SQLite databases, and Firefox 3 will be moving more data into RDBMS-managed storage including your browsing history for rapid access to the data.

    70,000 songs though? I imagine that if I split > 20 GB of DJ mixes up into single files I'd up the file count a bit. Instead, I make heavy use of cue sheets to identify and locate tracks within sets. iTunes, naturally, has no cue sheet support internally (as with Foobar2000) or via third-party plugins (as with Winamp). I find iTunes disappointing for its lack of developer enthusiasm with plugins, compared to the power Winamp offers both with supplied plugins (OS-wide keyboard bindings e.g. pause key for pause; mod music playback (e.g. ProTracker, Scream Tracker 3, Fasttracker 2 ...) etc) and third-party (one-click show/hide, OPL2 FM software emulator, and cue sheet reading and editing in my case).

    For really hard-core retro music you still need something like DeliPlayer, for sidtune support and Amiga custom modules. There are a few sidtune plugins for Winamp as well as a custom module player plugin but they all suck. DeliPlayer is an extremely comprehensive and extensible player but I can't stand the interface!

    Well, I'll be damned. DeliPlayer has a proper cuesheet reader! I just fed it a cuesheet and it added all the cue points from that DJ mix into the playlist. It's not my favourite way to do cue sheets (and with Winamp there's a plugin for each approach) but it's better than nothing and great to see another project recognise cue sheets.


  • Garbage Person

    @morbiuswilters said:

    I've heard a lot of people complain about how iTunes handles extremely large music libraries (70k+).  It's related to the fact that the metadata database is stored in XML and so opening it for the first time can take quite awhile.  I don't use iTunes, though, so I can only comment on what other people have stated.  I just use some custom stuff with a standard directory layout.  It scales quite well.  :-)
    If by "take awhile" you mean "crashes immediately" you would be correct.

    The winamp library (NOT the playlist - the LIBRARY. The playlist crashes out around 20,000) and Amarok with a PostgreSQL (NOT SQLite) backend are the only apps with a usefully high library capacity.



  • <")3

    @AbbydonKrafts said:

    @belgariontheking said:
    the smiling cyclops with balls on his chin!

    LOL!! I don't know what that one is.



    My last one was a dork with a cap on. I wanted to do a ballcap, but I couldn't think of any characters that would work, so it ended up being more like a derby hat.

    It's a chicken.



  • @Weng said:

    Amarok with a PostgreSQL (NOT SQLite) backend are the only apps with a usefully high library capacity.
    That depends on how you define useful. 

    As mentioned, I have 23000 songs, but I'll be the first one to admit that I may never listen to it all before I die.  70000?  Fagetaboutit.  How useful is an app that manages files you may never even USE? 

    Back when my list was a mere 2000 songs, I considered Winamp to be quite useful.



  • @belgariontheking said:

    As mentioned, I have 23000 songs, but I'll be the first one to admit that I may never listen to it all before I die.

    You have a death wish?



  • @Daniel Beardsmore said:

    You have a death wish?
    Heh,  didn't think about it that way, but to answer your question, no, I plan to live a long and productive life.



  • @belgariontheking said:

    Heh,  didn't think about it that way, but to answer your question, no, I plan to live a long and productive life.

    You mean, productive like, 15 kids or something?  :-)


  • @belgariontheking said:

    As mentioned, I have 23000 songs, but I'll be the first one to admit that I may never listen to it all before I die.  70000?  Fagetaboutit.  How useful is an app that manages files you may never even USE? 

    Back when my list was a mere 2000 songs, I considered Winamp to be quite useful.

    I happen to have just about the same amount of music. Its around 80GB, 23'000 tracks. I gave up on trying software music library management. Instead, I invested quite a bit of time in a nice directory structure. Now I usually find my music very fast (as on my NEO35 120GB-harddisk-based car MP3 player). Prerequisite: One needs to know ones collection.

    Thumbing through a list of 1000 artists or 2000 albums (as on my diskless-networked-MP3-player which requires tags navigation) isn't really inspiring. Neither is going through the list of genres and other shit. That info is never up-to-date or decently filled-in.



  • @belgariontheking said:

    I disagree.  A better program for dealing with very large (23000 song) music libraries I have never seen. 

    Winamp user for years, but my collection outgrew it.  I use Zune, but that's only so I can play the music on my xbox 360.

     

    I was gonna go yelling "bullshit!!", but now I see my playlist is only 13k songs (13041 if oyu really care). Anyway, I've tried iTunes and I too think it sucks ("I too" as if I had also quoted El_Heffe's comment).



  • You guys have so many songs. Where do you get them all? At most I have like 1200 songs in my collection. When you have 13000 songs, and you listen for, say, four hours a day, it will take more than half a year to listen to them all! To me that seems like too much music to enjoy properly.



  • @Welbog said:

    You guys have so many songs. Where do you get them all?
    I got mine from a service called Cdigix.  If your college (or in this case, your brother's) subscribes to the service, you get to download all the free music you want, but it has DRM.  Throw in a little tunebite action, and you have 23000 DRM-free songs.  

    I wouldn't say I have a wide variety of musical taste, it's just that I downloaded every heavy metal and comedy album that I could find.  Then I downloaded stuff from bands with just plain interesting names.  There are bands out there with names like Viking Skull, Very Metal, Hobbit, and my personal favorite, Your Mom Standard Rock Outfit. 

    I couldn't find a lot of bands on there, like the Beatles or Finger Eleven, but I made do with what I had.

    On that note, does anyone know of a program that will batch remove all the images that are embedded in mp3 files?  I think tunebite added them and they're so small that they're horribly blurred when blown up to full screen.  iTunes will remove them, but I only one by one.



  • @Welbog said:

    You guys have so many songs. Where do you get them all? At most I have like 1200 songs in my collection. When you have 13000 songs, and you listen for, say, four hours a day, it will take more than half a year to listen to them all! To me that seems like too much music to enjoy properly.

    Bought most of them on CD.  I listen to music at least 12 hours a day, but it's usually a small subset of the overall collection.  Keep in mind things like classical music collections which span 130 CDs -- it's not the sort of thing you are likely to listen to every day, but it's there. 



  • @morbiuswilters said:

    @Welbog said:

    You guys have so many songs. Where do you get them all? At most I have like 1200 songs in my collection. When you have 13000 songs, and you listen for, say, four hours a day, it will take more than half a year to listen to them all! To me that seems like too much music to enjoy properly.

    Bought most of them on CD.  I listen to music at least 12 hours a day, but it's usually a small subset of the overall collection.  Keep in mind things like classical music collections which span 130 CDs -- it's not the sort of thing you are likely to listen to every day, but it's there. 

    Oh yeah, I forgot to mention that the 250 CDs I own are not a part of that 23000.


  • @Welbog said:

    When you have 13000 songs, and you listen for, say, four hours a day, it will take more than half a year to listen to them all! To me that seems like too much music to enjoy properly.

    The fun part about having so many is loading an entire genre into a playlist, then set it to Random. It's much better than radio, and most of the time it's better than XM.



  • @Welbog said:

    You guys have so many songs. Where do you get them all? At most I have like 1200 songs in my collection. When you have 13000 songs, and you listen for, say, four hours a day, it will take more than half a year to listen to them all! To me that seems like too much music to enjoy properly.

     

    well, I just enjoy the vaguety of copyright/internet law over here and use Emule, but don't go around telling anyone, savvy?



  • @AbbydonKrafts said:

    The fun part about having so many is loading an entire genre into a playlist, then set it to Random. It's much better than radio, and most of the time it's better than XM.
     

    Thats what Spectate said!



  • @Welbog said:

    You guys have so many songs. Where do you get them all?

    In my case, the collection developed over the course of several years at my workplace, where I set up a "Music server", and a team of coworkers and I ripped and mp3-encoded the CD collection each one had at home. When I left that company, I took that hard disk home. I was almost the last one of that team leaving, anyway. Plus I recorded all of my LPs, cassettes and minidiscs. In the end, about a quarter of the full collection is my personal music which I know very well, the rest stems from former colleages, which I still meet from time to time over beer or two, by the way.

    So, yes, this is all perfectly legal. Nothing downloaded through peer-to-peer networks, as far as I can tell. But I still have a lot of music to discover :-)


  • @ZippoLag said:

    savvy?

    Jack Sparrow. How appropriate. I even heard that in my head as if he said the line. LOL



  • @belgariontheking said:

    On that note, does anyone know of a program that will batch remove all the images that are embedded in mp3 files?  I think tunebite added them and they're so small that they're horribly blurred when blown up to full screen.  iTunes will remove them, but I only one by one.

    Mp3tag (oder auf deutsch) – free as in beer, and a very comprehensive graphical tagging tool. It defaults to recursive folder reading, so select your root music folder, then Select All, right-click the music list and then pick Extended Tags. On the right is the cover art selector, hit X and then OK, and they should all get zapped.



  • @Daniel Beardsmore said:

    Mp3tag (oder auf deutsch) – free as in beer
    Hell yeah ... will try this when I get home

    EDIT:  err ... I mean, I am not browsing TDWTF forums at work.


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