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February 8, 2011 12:20 PM

132 GB of music, a new computer, and iTunes mandatory thanks to iPad. What are best practices with iTunes and/or the best music software for 2011?

The new computer is Win7, 8 GB of RAM and a couple of terrabyte drives. On the old box, I was running Foobar and (mandatory) iTunes, with all the music stored on one of two hard drives (generally speaking I have a "system" drive and a "stuff" drive). I must have iTunes for the iPad.

I'm wondering if iTunes is Really All That Bad any more, or if it's still something I'm best off avoiding and rolling with a different system, keeping iTunes just for iPad transfer duties.

My quick roundup of music solutions to date are:

Foobar2000: the Linux of media management programs: great if you have a wellspring of time and enthusiasm for tinkering, hacking, etc.
MediaMonkey: decent but annoying, in that it kept providing menu items and then popping up "no, you have to buy Gold!" messages.
Songbird: my mainstay at the office on my Mac, but buggy as hell in Windows.
WinAmp: 1998 called and wants its bloated, sprawling, nonsensical music management system back.

But it's been years -- years! -- since I've tried most of these. Maybe the landscape has changed! Maybe iTunes is okay now! I just don't know!

We're talking strictly music here -- video's sorted by VLC, a small number of files, and good practices re. foldering and sorting files.

What do you recommend, O Hivemind?

posted by Shepherd to computers & internet (22 answers total)

We're talking strictly music here -- video's sorted by VLC, a small number of files, and good practices re. foldering and sorting files.

I recommend you exercise the same good practices with your music and not tie yourself to Apple any more than you absolutely must.
posted by Civil_Disobedient at 12:42 PM on February 8, 2011 [2 favorites]

I used iTunes for the first time in years a few days ago, to redeem a gift card. I almost decided it wasn't worth the effort. Personally, I like Audacious on my laptop, letting the file system do what it was designed to do, organize the files and folders! But then, I'm old school. I almost always listen to albums all the way through, so all the play list management stuff is useless to me.
posted by COD at 12:49 PM on February 8, 2011

Since you have more music than the capacity of the iPad, I believe what you want is to manually manage the content with iTunes (as opposed to trying to sync your entire collection).
posted by exogenous at 1:03 PM on February 8, 2011 [1 favorite]

If you found MediaMonkey decent but annoying, try MusicBee. Fair warning that I don't use it to manage my iDevices but it will do that. I started using it to clean up my tagging.
posted by soelo at 1:09 PM on February 8, 2011

Maybe iTunes is okay now! I just don't know!
Can you articulate the reasons it wasn't okay for you before? Was it the file organization?
posted by soelo at 1:16 PM on February 8, 2011

I too am chained to iTunes by iOS devices. It's really that bad. (At least on Windows.) Slower than an arthritic dog trying to lift himself off the kitchen floor and insistent on its own bullshit proprietary lossless format. I hate it like poison.

So I use it only for sending stuff to the devices. I manage my music library, which is about twice the size of yours, with WinAmp - even though that means having to keep two different sets of playlists, etc.

I like WinAmp. It works. If you haven't used it for a while, you might want to give it another shot.
posted by Joe Beese at 1:27 PM on February 8, 2011 [2 favorites]

Foobar2000 is dead simple in my experience. Just install, setup a theme, and point it at your media library folder(s).
posted by yaymukund at 1:30 PM on February 8, 2011

When I was on Windows, I used Foobar2k because it was awesome. Now I'm on a Mac and use iTunes because I have and iPhone and it's fine. Nothing wrong on this end. 400GB of music, another 100GB of podcasts/iTunesU/etc. I don't really purchase music through iTunes, I'd rather buy a physical CD.

All TV and movies are on a file server, 4.5 TB worth doesn't fit into a laptop and I wouldn't want it to anyhow.
posted by Brian Puccio at 1:38 PM on February 8, 2011

iTunes is great on my 3-year-old desktop running Vista. I agree that it's unusably slow on older PCs, but that won't be a problem for you.

I've talked to PC users who hate iTunes (and used to be one!), and here are their main complaints:
1. It uses a database rather than the filesystem for organizing your media files.
2. It requires media files that have 100% correct ID3v2 tags, and ignores the filenames.
3. It's pretty useless when you're playing music - don't attempt to do anything else like browse your collection or tag your files.
4. It won't play formats like ogg, ape, flac. Also, converting to Apple's proprietary lossless format is a pain.

1 isn't a problem for me. If you have a really large collection, a database works much better. You can tag your music and create smart playlists.

2 used to be a problem, but just about everyone is using iTunes now, so files are tagged correctly.

3 is a legitimate concern.

4 is a problem because you do encounter ape/flac occasionally, and you'll need to convert those files yourself. You might want to convert them to lossy MP3, because decent tools that support Apple lossless are hard to come by.
posted by Pruitt-Igoe at 1:41 PM on February 8, 2011

Also, with iTunes, you may grow to love podcasts.
posted by Pruitt-Igoe at 1:42 PM on February 8, 2011 [1 favorite]

Something I forgot: iTunes is actually really slow when you import new music. As in, a modal dialog in front of the UI that responds to mouse clicks only every 5 seconds or so. This is especially true if you're importing from anything that's not a fast local hard drive - a data CD, a memory stick, a network shared drive, etc.
posted by Pruitt-Igoe at 1:46 PM on February 8, 2011 [1 favorite]

1. It uses a database rather than the filesystem for organizing your media files.
2. It requires media files that have 100% correct ID3v2 tags, and ignores the filenames.

These were the 2 biggest problems for me because I had a lot of college era "free" music that was shittily tagged if not tagged at all. So basically how I handled things is I use Foobar or Winamp rather equally for playback on my computer, when I got Itunes with/for my ipod I only imported "paid for" music into the library or music that I had already correctly tagged myself, and I change the tags of other old stuff in Foobar before putting it in the Itunes library. This process sucks, but I guess that's what I get for getting "free" music.
posted by WeekendJen at 3:06 PM on February 8, 2011

Oh, i tunes isnt that bad by the way, but i just like the option to open a folder (aka album) in winamp / foobar rather than staring at an itunes list and searching.
posted by WeekendJen at 3:07 PM on February 8, 2011

There are tools that will convert artist/title information in a filename into ID3 tags. Of course that won't work 100% of the time.
posted by Pruitt-Igoe at 3:37 PM on February 8, 2011

Yes, sometimes you want to open a single file and not add it to your library. I use VLC for that.
posted by Pruitt-Igoe at 3:39 PM on February 8, 2011 [1 favorite]

I change the tags of other old stuff in Foobar before putting it in the Itunes library. This process sucks, but I guess that's what I get for getting "free" music.

For me, all new media goes into an _unsorted directory (underscore + "unsorted", so it's always at the start of the root directory structure). Every couple of weeks I run MusicBrainz against it to automatically tag everything and graduate them to the primary Music folder.

Done.
posted by Civil_Disobedient at 3:47 PM on February 8, 2011

I agree that the Windows iTunes isn't up to par with the Mac. As far as I know, if you use an iDevice, you're better off using iTunes to avoid compatibility issues.

iTunes really hasn't changed since it's introduction. If you hated a database driven media program, you'll hate it now.

If you want to like iTunes, you should have it manage your music and never think about your file system again. I know, blasphemy. But after being an OCD music filing machine, I finally caved in and wished I did it sooner. I do all my tagging in iTunes and it updates the ID3 tags, file and folder names for me behind the scenes. As far as I know, the only thing it won't write to the ID3 is ratings and play counts. If you need help tagging, I'd suggest using something like Music Brainz before importing to iTunes.
posted by colecovizion at 4:03 PM on February 8, 2011

The way you've worded this question is horribly ambiguous,.. and I'm not sure how you expect to get any good factual data/answers out of it:

1.) You've described the new environment, but you have NOT described what features are important to YOU.

2.) You've said it's been "years" since you used any of these other music management programs. What does that mean? 2 years? 10 years? 20 years?

3.) You imply that iTunes was "really all that bad".. but you don't say WHY you think it was bad. What problems/drawbacks did YOU encounter.. and again, what features are important to you NOW ?

It'd be like me saying: "Wow, years ago I had a shitty '78 Datsun and that car was really bad. What cars are good now?"...

See?...

Give us specifics on what features you WANT (or what things are "deal-breakers").. and I'll bet you'll get much better answers.
posted by jmnugent at 4:14 PM on February 8, 2011

Great answers above, but some people want more clarity (I was trying to be succinct and not be one of those questions, but it's a fair comment).

As many above have already identified, my issues with iTunes have included, but are not limited to:
1. Speed of importing music;
2. Absolute necessity of managing all music through iTunes;
3. A lot of proprietary fooferaw that I have to manually deactivate, and requiring eight billion hours to create "gapless playback" when I get around to importing my library;
4. The fact that the entire thing locks up and/or grinds and/or crashes while labouring through an iPad sync;
5. Can't handle FLAC files;
6. A general creepy feeling that it wants to take over everything. Compare to, say, Foobar, which takes a lot more work to set up (or at least has been in my experience). Foobar is like a guy who will help you fix your computer if you take it over to his house and buy him a couple of beers, and then he'll tell you what to do and let you handle the screwdriver; iTunes is like you call the help line for your computer and the next day your computer is gone and replaced by a PowerPC that you're forced to log into with the password "IPledgeMyFirstbornToSteveJobs". It's not that bad, but it's too... solicitous.

I'm not going to get into detailed personal history with every audio player I've ever tried, but the goals are fairly obvious:

1. Listen to music.
2. View my music library.
3. Make playlists.
4. Listen to playlists.
5. Burn CDs from time to time.
6. Have a low enough footprint that I can listen to music without the damn thing taking up 90% of my processor and sounding like bones in a blender if I try to open a document or something while listening to music.
7. Have a rescan library function or something that lets me manage my music the way I want, according to my preferences, without having to do everything through this software.

That's really about it. That's all I want to do.

I've got my music collection about 70% tamed through a combination of Bulk Rename and MP3tag, where I've standardized my folder structure and file names, and tagged all the songs with adequate information and album art. I'm up to "S." I do not want iTunes to suddenly go through all of this and re-tag or re-organize my whole folder structure in some I-know-best frenzy of "database optimization."

And I'm aware that I can tell iTunes not to do this, but I'm deathly afraid I might misclick something and it will do it anyway. And I don't like the fact that it assumes this is something I want done.
posted by Shepherd at 6:22 AM on February 9, 2011

Given your updated description, it seems to me that you can probably wipe iTunes off your list. (for philosophical/ideological reasons). No matter how much better iTunes may/may not have gotten (opinion varies by individual).. it seems like you're fundamentally not willing to acquiesce to the Apple approach.

But I'd like to touch on some of the iTunes issues anyways:

> 1. Speed of importing music

I've never had this problem. I've been using iTunes for the past couple major revisions, across both Windows XP and Mac boxes and also importing music from local and shared/network drives.. and it's never been slow (in my opinion of "slow"). The only time I've noticed any slowness is trying to import over a wireless connection that was also bogged down because it's open/free that I share with neighbors who hog my bandwidth.

> 2. Absolute necessity of managing all music through iTunes

I get around this by keeping all original/virgin downloaded music files in an "untouchable" location (say: portable backup drive or 3rd hard drive). I use that as my "depot" location which is where I clean up Filenames/ID3 tags,etc. Once I get that done, I copy it to an "IMPORT" folder (on my C:\ ) .. and then launch iTunes and "Add to Library" from the "IMPORT" folder...

This is more work obviously.. but it also means since I have an original/depot location for all my media, it gives me benefits of: 1.) easy backup,.. 2.) I can copy files to test in ANY media player and not lose all the work I put into cleanup/organizing my original depot location.

> 3. Proprietary fooferaw that I have to manually deactivate, long time to create "gapless playback"

Well, you only have to turn those features off ONCE. I've never had a problem with slow "gapless playback" .. and my library is pushing 80+gig.

> 4. The fact that the entire thing locks up and/or grinds and/or crashes while labouring through an iPad sync

Never had that problem either. (and I'm syncing an iPad with an XP laptop that's 4 or 5 years old.

> 5. Can't handle FLAC files

I use Foobar and LAME encoder to convert FLAC to 320bitrate MP3 and then copy those to my "IMPORT" folder before adding to iTunes. Original FLAC files get left in my untouchable "depot" location.

> 6. A general creepy feeling that it wants to take over everything.

I don't think iTunes is as bad as say, RealPlayer used to be. It definitely has it's quirks, and you'd need to dig in and educate yourself about those quirks,.. but if you're not willing to do that,.. then it's probably not the media manager for you.

Regarding the goals you listed,.. iTunes can do most of those except:

> 6.) Have a low enough footprint that I can listen to music without the damn thing taking up 90% of my processor

If that's happening... then something else is wrong with your system. On my original Mac Mini (1.8ghz and only 1gig of Ram and only 64meg integrated video), iTunes only takes about 3 seconds to launch and playing music only takes about 3% CPU. Library size = 84gig). On my WinXP laptop, its a little slower to launch and a little higher CPU, but not even remotely close to 90% CPU)

> 7. Have a rescan library function or something that lets me manage my music the way I want, according to my preferences, without having to do everything through this software.

That's probably going to be a deal-breaker with iTunes. You CAN set iTunes to let you "Manage my files manually"... but that's not really an ideal way to do it. (it gets messy). The whole point of iTunes is that it's database driven and all the features (library search, playlists, etc) all depend on letting iTunes be in charge.

I had a hard time understanding that philosophy (from a Windows point of view)... until recently when I migrated from an original Mac Mini to a new Mac Mini. Using the Apple Migration Wizard, my iTunes library, playlists, play-counts and well, pretty much everything was copied over FLAWLESSLY. I mean, utterly flawlessly. I didn't have to do anything but login, and had everything exactly as it was on my old Mac Mini.

Granted, that's all Mac environment, and the Windows version of iTunes is not quite as stable/fast... but it's not horrible. My experience (as an IT support person) has been that most people having problems with the Windows version of iTunes are having those problems because of deeper system-wide glitches (hard drive failing, not enough memory, needs to be Defragged, needs chipset drivers updated,etc)

Sorry for the length of this response.
posted by jmnugent at 9:23 AM on February 9, 2011

um, for those recommending winamp, i'm not positive that it supports ipads out of the box? See this recent winamp forum post for example.

You mentioned MediaMonkey, and it is decent but annoying like you say, but it does now have (ongoing) support for iDevices, up to 4.2.1. You can see commentary and the most up to date betas available here.
posted by kev23f at 10:15 AM on February 9, 2011

oh, I should have said - I have an iphone and prefer to use winamp for most things. When I need to mess about with music on the actual phone I use either MusicMonkey, or access the music directly by using PwnTunes. (device needs to be jailbroken)
posted by kev23f at 10:19 AM on February 9, 2011