The Song Fight Bulletin Board

I just got an iPod for my birthday (proof that I have my finger on the pulse of trendy music technology), and much to my chagrin it looks like there's no way to avoid installing iTunes. So I do, and like some lumbering pack animal it tromples (portmanteau!) through my harddrives and adds all the mp3s to its list, plus every guitar take I've ever recorded, and every sample off of every sample CD, then starts converting tons of shit into 128 bitrate AAC files. With the most patience I could muster I tried to send a couple albums to my iPod, but iTunes was infuriatingly unresponsive. I realize this was probably because it was busy trying (and failing) to download the album art for "song 7 of 19,832: Shitty_Guitar_Take5", but eventually I got so bored of waiting for it to acknowledge my mouse clicks that I killed the process and disconnected my iPod. Suprise suprise... that totally bungled its file system, and I had to restore it to factory settings. Fucking gah.

So, because I am the last person in the world to get an iPod, I know that all of you must have one. Is there any good way to use it without iTunes? Or, if you do use iTunes, how do you stop it from raping your PC?

In the preferences/settings for iTunes, there are checkboxes that you can uncheck that ought to prevent it from scanning your drive(s) for mp3s (or maybe it only does that the first time you launch it? if so it ought to ask if you'd like it to do that...), and from copying the mp3s it finds into its "iTunes Music Library" folder. Also in there you can set your default settings for importing music, from CDs or whatever. You can choose the type of file to make and the bitrate, etc. etc. I don't think it actually tries to download album art for stuff unless it's stuff you bought from the iTunes Music Store. I have nothing from the store and I have no album art and when I tell it to download album art nothing happens, so I'm assuming it's ignoring my non-iTMS stuff. Speaking of the iTMS, in your settings you can get rid of that, by going to the badly named section for "protecting your kids" or whatever the f it's called. I turn that crap off so I don't accidentally click on it then spend 1 minute waiting for iTunes to become responsive again while it loads their bullshit homepage.

Stop wearing those short skirts, itunes just can't help itself. Seriously, am I the only person that finds the word "rape" offensive in this context? Whatever, we all have our little quirks, I guess.

Anyways, my iPod is now completely dead (first major breakdown: High and Dry!) but before that I'd been using Winamp to load songs and that seemed to work fine. There is also a freeware program called Ephpod that I had some good luck with. It was especially nice when the ipod database got messed up: it could rebuild from scratch without having to reload anything. At any rate, you do have choices.

OK, I just realized I'd downloaded iTunes on my Windows laptop at work (where I am right now, sadly) but never run it, so I can give more specific info. When you first launch it, after you agree to the EULA, you probably wanted to uncheck the "Add MP3 and AAC files" and "Add WMA files" checboxes... Personally I like to have iTunes keep its music folder organized. Then hell "No" I don't want to be taken to the iTMS.

Then in "Edit" -> "Preferences..." you probably want to:

uncheck "Show links to Music Store" under "General"
maybe turn off "Crossfade playback" under "Playback"
pick your encoder of choice next to "Import Using:" and settings next to "Settings:" under "Import" under "Advanced"
check the "Disable" boxes next to the things you don't want in your "Source" column of your main window under "Parental Control", like for me Podcast, Radio, and Music Store

First off, I really have become fond of Itunes. At first, I felt like you because it wanted to take control of every piece of media on my computer.

First off, I went into the options list and told it only I could tell itunes what media I want to put on it. You can delete everything and start over. Click "music" on the left, then click file, then click add file to library, it will open a browse box, then go find what you want to add the the music library. Now you've only added music that you wanted.

Second, when ever you plug your ipod in to the computer, itune will open and it will show your ipod in the list on the left. Simply highlight the song(s) in your music library that you want to move over and add to your ipod list. Then right click and click "play list" or if you have multiple play lists like I do, pick which play list you want to add the highlighted songs to. When you click "Puces Ipod" it will automatically add them to your ipod.

After you get used to itunes and learn all the features, you'll love it.

edit: I took so long to type this, two others said pretty much what I did, but I'm not deleting it, lol.

Simple answer: Don't use iTunes! iTunes is fetid, rotting filth.

Yamipod is the solution, although I don't know how to put movies on mine with it, but who uses an ipod for movies anyway?

Puce, that same reason is why I uninstalled itunes from my PC. Millions of WAVs and you used to not be able to filter WAV from MP3. From the comments it sounds like that option has now been added, which is good.
-bill

I'm with you, Puce. But I have this problem with Windows Media Player, too.

Billy's Little Trip wrote:After you get used to itunes and learn all the features, you'll love it.

I'm still waiting for this to happen to me. 2 years and counting.

Way back in ye ole Napster days, I used to love me some Sonique. You would tell it to play files, and it would play them. Since then, all the media players I've encountered seem to be more proactive: scanning my drive for every audio/video/playlist file and calling the whole lot my "Library"*. Oh, and keeping me informed of the hottest new releases! Hot Hot!! But that's just me kvetching.

My current iTunes peeve (check back for more Hot Peeves! Hot Hot!!) is SongFight! related. I want to click the "stream all" link on the SF! main page and have iTunes start playing the m3u list all shuffled up. But 2 things happen:

1) The files open in the main library, and my shuffle includes all the songs I own. I have to make a new playlist, place the SF! songs onto that list, then play the list. Since I'm actually opening a playlist (a m3u file), this seems entirely rendundant.

2) The files are just pointers to web addresses, which is normally fine, but sometimes the songfight server can't keep up and I'd rather just have the MP3 files. I can't find a way to tell iTunes to get them all. It looks like iTunes treats "streamed" files as entirely different animals from local files. Probably the correct behavior from a DRM standpoint, but Mr. DRM doesn't live at SF!

So now, it seems best to "Copy Linked File" for every song on the page to some folder, drag the files into a blank playlist window, and shuffle them. Blech. Instead, I click on each one in their webpage-shuffled order and listen using QuickTime in my browser. Which seems so stupid.

Hopefully, I'm just being an idiot and some kind Mac guru will clue me in to the big "Do What Mostess Wants" button in the middle of my screen. Because some people, who are not crazy, do love iTunes.

*Next Week: Mostess moans about how when browsers install, they create subfolders in their Bookmarks folders called "Links". As if all the other bookmarks are not links.

iTunes handles .m3us really badly. I use Windows Media Player to stream all the songs when I'm at work. At home on my Mac I just listen to them one at a time, sadly.

Just enjoying Mac's delicious UNIX center...
Looks like, on my 1.67GHz G4 with a direct T1 ethernet connection, I'll be listening to some songs in about 2 hours.

UPDATE: Hour and a half! Not bad. Now I hope everyone filled in their ID3 tags...

Lunkhead wrote:OK, I just realized I'd downloaded iTunes on my Windows laptop at work (where I am right now, sadly) but never run it, so I can give more specific info. When you first launch it, after you agree to the EULA, you probably wanted to uncheck the "Add MP3 and AAC files" and "Add WMA files" checboxes... Personally I like to have iTunes keep its music folder organized. Then hell "No" I don't want to be taken to the iTMS.

Then in "Edit" -> "Preferences..." you probably want to:

uncheck "Show links to Music Store" under "General"
maybe turn off "Crossfade playback" under "Playback"
pick your encoder of choice next to "Import Using:" and settings next to "Settings:" under "Import" under "Advanced"
check the "Disable" boxes next to the things you don't want in your "Source" column of your main window under "Parental Control", like for me Podcast, Radio, and Music Store

Thanks Lunk - that's very useful - I'd never even thought to look in the 'preferences' bit to streamline things

Mostess wrote:Just enjoying Mac's delicious UNIX center...

Code: Select all

#!/bin/csh
#
# playfight
#
# one argument: URL of fight playlist.m3u
#
# rbs
# Mon Mar 26 14:06:56 EDT 2007
#
#
curl $1 > playlist.m3u
set filename = 1;
foreach thing (`cat playlist.m3u`)
   curl $thing > song$filename.mp3
   @ filename += 1
end
open -a "iTunes" *.mp3

Looks like, on my 1.67GHz G4 with a direct T1 ethernet connection, I'll be listening to some songs in about 2 hours.

UPDATE: Hour and a half! Not bad. Now I hope everyone filled in their ID3 tags...

i mirrored the fight. first post in the review thread. no need to wait.

Yep, you're right about the streaming and itunes. There may be a better way to handle streams, but I haven't had the need, so I haven't looked any further. Just like you mentioned, I have a folder on my desk top called "song fight" of all things. In said folder I have sub folders with the name of each fight. I copy each weeks songs to a new folder. When I'm ready to put them on my ipod, I tell itunes to add such and such folder to such and such play list on itunes. From there, I add them to my ipod.
...you know, now that I typed all this, it seems like a lot of work to use itunes! .....they can put a man on the moon, but I have to go through, God KNOWS, how many steps (3) to get songs from people all over the world on to my huge bulky cumbersome digital media device (2 inches wide X 3 inches long) just to hear music!!!

Mostess wrote:a bunch of stuff about mp3s and iTunes

http://songfight.org/podcast.html

Mostess wrote:Hopefully, I'm just being an idiot and some kind Mac guru will clue me in to the big "Do What Mostess Wants" button in the middle of my screen.

Spud wrote:http://songfight.org/podcast.html

Jesus (Mat:7:7) wrote: Knock and the door shall be opened unto you.

blue wrote:i mirrored the fight. first post in the review thread. no need to wait.

And you, sir, are awesome. I'm timing your server with the same script...

UPDATE: 6 minutes!

You know, I read this and thought, "I think iTunes is great."

And then, not one day later, I plug my iPod into my computer (after not having done so in a while), and I'm greeted with a screen that's basically forcing me to sync my iPod to my computer. If I say ok, it gives me a dialog saying "are you sure? You'll lose the music on your iPod." So I say no. So now I have to buy an external HD to back up my iPod music on just in case it really does wipe it. At first glance, it seems that Apple WITHDREW functionality. If this is truly the case, I'm never buying another iPod ever again, and neither will I recommend any Apple music product to anyone.

c hack wrote:forcing me to sync my iPod to my computer.

I'm seriously not usually this grumpy about stuff. But my sister-in-law recently passed away and we were charged with saving her iPod collection for posterity. Damned if I could find a way using anything official. Eventually I found some hack freeware thing that could see the iPod as it is: it's just an external USB drive, for crying out loud. Got the files off of it.

That the DRM people have hijacked this stuff is seriously disgusting. I can't really blame Apple: there are laws, afterall. But yes, the software is actually designed to prevent you from fully using your hardware. Hooray!

It shouldn't be this way.

That said, the SongFight! podcast works like a charm and will be my method of choice from now on.

There's actually a not too painful workaround for this:

1. Plug in your iPod.
2. From the Desktop, go to My Computer and find the iPod (usually designated by a drive letter. i e. E: or F:)
3. Open it up, make sure you are viewing Hidden Files and Folders.
4. In your iPod folder/drive, there you will find a folder called iPod_Control
5. Copy this folder to your hard drive. If you go into iTunes and tell it to pull in music from that folder, voila!

Some more deets

For all the effort apple puts into its hardware design, their software designs are often so poorly conceived that it causes me physical pain. At least their PC implementations anyway:

Why do you need a twin pair of evil 3.5Mb processes running in the background when I'm not even using the program? These processes, by the way, interfere with CuBase and can cause paralysis, epilepsy, and death. Run CuBase with processes on = unpredictable, run CuBase with processes killed = CuBase works stably.

Why do you reinstate Quicktime into the registry when I've specifically gone in there to remove it because I don't need that running all the time either?

Why do I need to waste computer power making sure that my apple software is up to date every minute of every day?

No I don't want you to reassign every file to some other format without explicitly asking me, thank you.
________________________
Ahhh.... breathe....
Thanks I needed that.

I now use iTunes exclusively. Now I have an iPod and a Mac, I understand the design better. It's pretty seamless.

However, I've never seen a program that gets updated more frequently. It seems monthly there is a new "version". Here's today's flavor:

With iTunes 7.3, you can now activate iPhone service and sync it with your music, TV shows, movies and more. Also, you can now wirelessly share and enjoy your favorite digital photos from any computer in your home with Apple TV. iTunes 7.3.1 addresses a minor problem with iTunes 7.3 accessing the iTunes Library.

This is insane. I haven't heard it cited in years (I can't even find it using Google!), but someone has a law stating that every software development team will keep adding features until the software can send/receive email. iTunes isn't there yet, believe it or not. This program needs to be stopped and chopped up now, before it becomes its own OS.

Here's a free third party utility that greatly improves iTunes's handling of .m3u files, on Mac and Windows:

http://www.burroak.on.ca/m3u2itunes.html