I’ve just moved my media off an internal drive on the desktop onto a nice big NAS, and added all of Penny stuff that used to be separate. So naturally, that means rebuilding the libraries on the various media software, including three separate iTunes installations.
It’s all organised in a music folder: music/artist/album. Except, of course, you can’t just add or drag the music folder into iTunes. The prospect of adding 6000 tracks makes it go wobbly and fall over. I guess creating 60,000 line XML and library database files is just too much.
So, you have to select a couple of dozen folders to drag in at a time. This takes a couple of hours – yes HOURS! – per drag. It clicks through, ‘processing’ each track for a few seconds. Then, and only then, it starts ‘processing’ album art. Why? It’s right there in the folder and in the ID3 tag! So a few seconds more per album (274 in the last drag) before you can drag in another lot.
It took most of the afternoon to do this on my PC, slightly longer on Penny’s laptop and about four times as long on my new MacBook!
Appletards would say “let iTunes organise your music, just trust it”. But they are dickheads. It’s my machine, I’ll do what I damn well like with my files. One program that I only need for the iPhone should not be dictating how I run my machine. Not only that, but it would only help on one machine, not the other two.
I should point out that I directed WinAmp, MediaMonkey and Songbird at the new drive and all three had indexed the lot, ready for use and with album art in place, within 5 minutes.
iTunes slows itself with it’s bloody stupid library databases. They add nothing, except locking iTunes to your library, your library to one machine and your iPod to iTunes. Every other media player offers the same, and better, functionality without them. But no, Apple want complete control.
All other media players will keep watch on your drive. If you add some files from elsewhere, they’ll index them straight away.
iTunes won’t. You have to add them manually – rubbish for a shared media drive.
Other programs don’t care if you delete
something – after all, if you put it back they’ll quietly re-index it anyway.
iTunes goes mental. It gives a little ! for each missing track. But can you just say “remove all missing tracks”? Can you buggery. Yup, you have to select and delete them individually. You can’t even list all the missing tracks, you have to go looking for them.
I only use iTunes for my iPhone. That and there are no real alternatives for straight media playing on Mac because everything Jobs does is wonderful. Songbird is nearly there but not quite yet.
I wish I didn’t have to use it. And when Jobs’s shrivelled liver finally passes through his urethra, I will line up to piss on his grave for the days I’ve lost doing iTunes job for it and adding my own bloody files.
