I recently inherited an iPod from my dad and have therefore been forced to install iTunes on my computer. This program sucks a big pile of broken glass up my nose! If it wasn't for the fact that I like to listen to music and podcasts on the way to work I wouldn't have bothered. Here are a few of the problems that I have come across.
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When you rip music to your computer it helps if you can find it again. This is why you would expect your media ripper to create a folder structure of Artist->Album and put all of the songs in there. This just isn't good enough for iTunes and it had totally ruined my music collection by putting files all over the place. For some reason, if the album has ANY (and I mean ANY!) other person contributing to a song in addition to the artist who has written the song it puts the entire album into a folder called "compilations". It doesn't do this all of the time however and will also create literally hundreds of folders called Artist feat. Another Artist. What the difference is I can't figure out, and it has utterly ruined by Cypress Hill collection by creating literally 30 folders. I wish Apple(spit!) wouldn't do this. Why is this even a good idea? Who in the world would want it this way? The gauling thing is that there isn't even a way (that I can find) to stop it doing this. Why not categorise the music by Artist and then Ablum? Why bother even looking at the composing meta data?
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If this wasn't bad enough, when I try to sort out the terrible state my music collection has got into iTunes will come along and put it back the way it was before. Not only that. (Oh no, that would be too simple!) It also leaves in all of the broken back references to the music which it has just moved.
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For some odd reason when ripping my vast CD collection using iTunes it not only puts random beeps and jumps in some tracks but will also stop ripping 30 seconds from the end of the CD. So when you are listening to the last track on the album you are treated to it simply stopping. This doesn't happen when I use Windows Media Player, and I can get the same effect when I use different computers so it is clear that this is not just my machine playing about. Why, oh why would you ever want this to happen?
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I have been using iTunes for about 3 months to listen to podcasts and it was only LAST WEEK that I found out how to play any track I wanted from a particular podcast. For weeks I have been messing around with settings, pushing buttons, right clicking and generally having a hard time trying to listen to the back catalogue from some of my favourite podcasts. All utterly futile. When you have a podcast downloaded you will see a little grey arrow (triangle really) to the left hand side. I ACCIDENTALLY clicked on this arrow one day and the podcast title expanded and revealed the entirety of the episodes of the podcast I had clicked on. I was astonished! This arrow looks more like a decoration than a button! Why didn't they just create the NORMAL sort of plus and minus system that everyone else on the entire planet uses? No. They have to mess about with the stupid interface and confuse everyone.
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Lets say you just downloaded a podcast that has 100 episodes, which isn't all that rare. Want to listen to episode 53 on the way to work? Tough! iTunes will only let you listen to lots of stupid combinations of "Most recent 10 unlistened" or "Least recent 5 unlistened" from any podcasts that you select. You can select them all to be uploaded, but this tends to fill anyone who doesn't have a 16GB iPod. You can create a playlist and use this, but this just breaks the way that an iPod plays podcasts and is totally wothless.
I will stick with Windows Media Player (which is a vastly better program - with a vastly better name!) to listen, rip and watch my media. I will only use iTunes to sync my iPod and download podcasts. I am seriously thinking about buying a Creative Zen simply so that I don't have to use this broken bile of monkey poo.
Finally, there is another thing that really annoy me. Podcasts. This makes it seem like it can only be listened to on an iPod. WRONG! When you subscribe to a podcast you are just downloading a syndication feed that links to some audio or video files. Lots of different software is available to download and manage podcasts, not just the broken rubbish from Apple(spit!). However, the name seems to have stuck with people in the industry, and I can't think of a better one than blogcasts. Which is kind of different really...