Help an iTunes hater out...

September 8, 2008 5:46 PM

Help an iTunes hater. I have 400 similarly tagged items I want to delete as I listen to them. Why won't iTunes let me have a column that is just "filename"? Every other media player can do that. And don't even get me started on the "keep my music organized" check box. The only way I could get my 400 items into iTunes with unique names was to turn that off, import the 400 items, and use a 3rd party id3 tagger to read the filename into the tag. I thought the Mac experience was supposed to be easy. I must be missing something really stupid. Is there an easier way?
posted by Area Control to computers & internet (15 comments total)

You can probably do this using the "play count" field. Create one smart playlist whose criteria are tagname=whatever and playcount=0; create another with tagname=whatever and playcount=1. Listen to the first playlist. As you work your way through it, the songs will disappear from it and reappear on the second playlist. From there you can delete them. It's not precisely "listen and delete" but it's close.
posted by adamrice at 5:57 PM on September 8, 2008

Actually, you probably want to make that playcount>0 rather than playcount=1.
posted by adamrice at 5:58 PM on September 8, 2008

It's not iTunes fault at all. But it's not my fault either. They are what they are. They came this way. And yes, I can already easily sequence through my stories, without repeating. It's just that I'd like to easily see the filenames, which are the individual program titles. Why can't the file name be a sortable field?
posted by Area Control at 6:32 PM on September 8, 2008

Every other media player can do that.

I don't mean to be snarky, but why not use another media player? If iTunes isn't meeting your needs, there are plenty of other players.
posted by Brandon Blatcher at 6:41 PM on September 8, 2008

These guys do some iPod management software that may help.
posted by Artw at 6:43 PM on September 8, 2008

In the absence of other data, the filename is usually taken as the title. It's surprising that it wouldn't be in your case.

If you've got data other than the filename in the title field but you really want to sort on the filename, that's a different kettle of fish. here is a script that will put the filename in the comments field. You could easily hack it to put the filename in a different field, although the comments will do for your purposes.
posted by adamrice at 6:44 PM on September 8, 2008

I don't mean to be snarky, but why not use another media player? If iTunes isn't meeting your needs, there are plenty of other players.

To be fair, the presence of iTunes on Macs has done some pretty serious damage to the Mac media-player market - not that it's entirely nonexistant, but the ecosystem's much worse-off than you might expect.

Note: I'm about to say something that's opinionated. YMMV and all that.

I thought the Mac experience was supposed to be easy. I must be missing something really stupid.

The reason the Mac experience is "supposed to be easy" is that Apple heavily optimizes for the common case, and actively ignores many edge cases. In non-nerdspeak, they try to make things really great for almost everybody... and they don't seem to care that, yes, sometimes this makes things pretty bad for a small group of people. You're "doing it wrong," as the kids say, and Apple really doesn't care, because they build their software for the common case, not to make your weird special case easy to handle.

Unlike Microsoft, Apple doesn't seem to be interested in making their software be everything to everybody - they'd rather make 80% of the population love it, and if 20% hate it, well, 80% is more than enough to make Apple happy. This extends to even options menus: Very few people need or want to have a filename in iTunes, and having even the option alongside meaningful column types creates confusion when the useful part of an MP3 file is supposed to be contained in its tags. It also discourages doing things the right way, which is using the metadata.

To conclude, I'd suggest you use one of the billions of retagging tools out there to put the filename into, say, the Title field and re-import.
posted by Tomorrowful at 7:05 PM on September 8, 2008 [3 favorites]

I suspect part of the reason iTunes doesn't include filename as a viewable field is because it's not a static item, under their "ideal" install. If you let iTunes organize everything, the filename/path can change each time you update the metadata.
posted by nomisxid at 9:00 PM on September 8, 2008

I don't mean to be snarky, but why not use another media player? If iTunes isn't meeting your needs, there are plenty of other players.

Mostly because I have the silly phone, and also because I'm trying to conform to make things easy.

I suspect part of the reason iTunes doesn't include filename as a viewable field is because it's not a static item, under their "ideal" install. If you let iTunes organize everything, the filename/path can change each time you update the metadata.

Ahh, I realized that iTunes renames files as it imports them, and that these names are not necessarily related to the content of the file. Also that they can change behind the scenes during "keep my music organized" operations.

Artw, thanks for the link. As I mentioned, I actually have the phone. I'm checking into some alternatives, but I don't want to lost some of the other sync features.

Adamrice, thanks for the scripts, I'll give them a try.

I suppose things just changed one day when I wasn't looking. "No, Area, no one keeps their music in files anymore. We all use a database now." Maybe I'm getting old. Maybe I'm part of the 20%. I have tens of thousands of very unusual tracks, most probably untagged. I have a lot of stuff that doesn't get automatically identified on import. Maybe iTunes just isn't for me.

Thanks for all the responses.
posted by Area Control at 6:11 AM on September 9, 2008

If you want to delete a file, press option-delete while it's selected. A dialogue window will ask if you want to move the selected song to the Trash, or keep it in the iTunes Music folder. Move it to the trash, then go empty the trash.

If you're on Windows then I assume you'd press alt-delete, then go empty the trash.

If they're all similarly tagged you could probably even make a smart playlist to pick them all up.

In general, the way Apple wants you to use iTunes is to completely stop caring about the file system and use the ID3 tags instead. It's pretty awesome once you let go of that need, IMHO, except for cursing people who still use WinAmp and think that all the metadata only belongs in the filename when you try to bring in music they ripped.
posted by egypturnash at 6:15 AM on September 9, 2008

Yeah, deleting with the option key works great.
I'm working on letting go of my file system bias... But I still don't trust the "keep my music organized". Also, you kids get off my lawn. hehee
posted by Area Control at 6:55 AM on September 9, 2008

egypturnash writes "except for cursing people who still use WinAmp"

Winamp treats files exactly the same way as iTunes, if the ID3/4 tag is there. Even down to the album art. I use it for my normal playback on my Windows machine because iTunes is a massive resource hog. File name idiocy isn't due to the program, it's due to idiots.

iTunes suffers from the same drawbacks as iPhoto: It's a good enough program for most people, especially if those people use it exclusively and never need to use their media on more than one computer. While I do use iTunes to import & organize my music, I still refuse to use iPhoto for pictures unless I have to (like for ordering prints as gifts), and use alternate media players for playback (because VLC doesn't pause to recompile my library on open, it just plays the goddamn file like I asked it to). I really can't understand why Apple doesn't feel that the ability to automatically scan for and remove missing files, or to automatically add any files in a watched folder, are not important options in a media management program. It makes no sense to me whatsoever.
posted by caution live frogs at 6:55 AM on September 9, 2008

I don't let itunes auto-organize on my main library. I've been doing right-click / show in finder / right-click / move to trash to get rid of files.

(Egypturnash, you are correct that option-delete would be fewer clicks, but on my 10.4 system it immediately removed it from the playlist -- I must have changed a preference along the way.)
posted by omnidrew at 7:16 AM on September 9, 2008

I'd drag the files into a regular playlist, & have the smart playlists (to play, played) filter on that. To delete the file I think it's shift-delete.
posted by Pronoiac at 2:45 PM on September 9, 2008

Doug's Apple Script did it. It was pretty easy to edit and use it, and I think I'll use variations of it for more stuff. Thanks again to everyone who responded.
posted by Area Control at 4:58 PM on September 9, 2008