I just got an ipod after having a couple of Archos players, my last one just broke and I saw a cheap ipod just after and thought why not? My major annoyance is the way it handles my music. Itunes is awful as far as Im concerned; I have around 10000 tracks and it lists them in one long list...wow thats useful. Am I missing something here? is there a way to list them in a tree view so I can actually have a chance of seeing an order to them? Also both the ipod and itunes dont recognise all the tags Ive done for the mp3s so I have a long list of unknown files, and itunes has no way to get the information from the folder tree layout or file name, which I have organised perfectly. There is no way to use windows explorer to transfer files onto the ipod so I have to open another program to do it, this is just an annoyance more than anything, which would be better if itunes didnt suck so bad. I also have a dislike for the firmware on the ipod and the way it organises tracks. I know there are Rockbox and ipod linux out there but that would mean sacraficing video. So in conclusion Archos > Apple. Rant over.
u can arrange then in album,genre,artist...many ways tho i have found that giving all details like artist and album helps alot when trying to "group" similar music.
if your music is tagged properly, itunes has no issues, and if you hit browse in the upper right, it makes it easier to manage i honestly prefer itunes over any other mp3 player
Yes, see above posts. If you've correctly used ID1/3 tags you should have no problem. I just chucked 2600 songs on to itunes and not a single one has come up unknown. Why did you buy a ipod then? It's pretty well know it's not a "plug+drag" type player.
Umm, not sure what you mean by this. Ipods can sort it by artist, song title, album title or genre. Each of these leads of another layer (or tree with the other options like you said you wanted from itunes) How else would you want it to be sorted?
iPod may suck - but not because of the software side of it. You can always get 3rd party programs if you don't like iTunes. I personally love iTunes. If your music is tagged correctly, or at least has a file name that corresponds with the song, you can use the search feature, which filters it down as you type. As for the iPod's organization of tracks - if you don't have proper tags, you're screwed then.
TRY ml_ipod or something like that its a winamp plug in and lets you transfer files through winamp. I preferr it to iTunes.
I used to be against the iPod, and had only heard of iTunes from others, so I didn't like it. However, since my GF got her iPod, I have found iTunes to be quite good at organising music. I would still prefer a drag and drop mechanism, but for my GF all she has to do is plug her iPod in and wait a minute or two and it all done To each their own I guess. Love it or loath it.
I still got my Archos. Still love it. though i use iTunes.. go figure.. in fact i installed ITunes onto the Archos and set my music directory to be the Archos
i just wish there was some way of either getting itunes to repeatable scan my mp3 folder or better yet change the stupid method of how it sorts and renames files considering they are all tagged and sorted exactly how i like them to be mp3\artist\artist - trackname.mp3 >.< ipods **** me off mainly because dry skin + a dry environment mean its a pain to use the stupid wheel though finding an mp3 player with hardware as good as the mini is going to be hard
(didn't read other reply's) Obviously you haven't mastered iTunes yet. Switching to iTunes when u already have a folder-based music archive can be a pain (alot of work). But folder based archive is really very simple and limited in options. iTunes throws your musc in one big pile. Then you can create "playlists", these playlist contain references to songs from this big pile. One song can be in as many playlists as you like. You can manually make playlists (select a bunch of songs and create a playlist). But if your songs are named correctly (author/bandname, trackname, album name), then you can use smart-playlist. This is automatically select the songs that fit the parameters you've choosen, it can also be automatically updated (adding songs to the playlist). There alot of options next to these, but thats just the basic. So I reckon you'll need a few hours to make everything into playlist, like they were folders before. I have playlists by artist, by album, by genre and a compilations with all the better songs. Hope this helps, L PS: Just because you don't get how iTunes works, does not make 'archos' (whatever that is) better then Apple. Give it some time, I was not too happy about it either in the beginning, but once you get the hang of it, you won't want anything else. Folder-based is so 1990's!
I had a bunch of wrongly-tagged MP3s when I first got my iPod. Spent forever trying to do a folder-based thing; used Anapod Explorer and then the ml_ipod plugin to do transferring. One day I decided that doing so was just a major PITA, so I said 'screw it' and just retagged the messed up songs (which, in reality, was not a huge amount). Between multiple selecting and editing in Explorer and the same in iTunes, it really didn't take long at all. Long story short, I had the exact situation you do now, but I'm extremely glad that I took a little time to get things fixed - everything else is SO much easier to work with. Yes, use the "browse" thing. I don't know why the heck that's not enabled by default. That always throws me off on a new install. Very logical with that on. And indeed, playlists. I've never messed with smart playlists, but I'm sure they're quite useful. I'm always modifying my playlist a bit and usually have a few for different moods
also, there are programs out there that can correctly tag everything for you based upon folder structure and song name... i know, that's what I did when I made the switch to iTunes and apple... now iTunes rips all of my cds, so it's no issue
iTunes can folder sort too. My music library is sorted through folders by artist, then album. It's actually the most organized "thing" on my entire hard drive. As long as you turn the setting for iTunes to auto-copy/sort, and have proper tags, your music will be folder sorted as well.
This seems to be what you need, though I have not tried it myself. It has an option to tag all of your files based on the hierarchical file structure/file name. It uses regular expressions, so it might require some learning, but I'm sure you could get some help here. It can also get info from an online database, but I'm not sure if that is automatic or not. Not to derail the thread too much, but conversly, just because you've never heard of archos or don't like how it organizes files, does not make apple better than archos. Both companies make very different players, making a comparison very (ahem) apples to oranges.
iTunes is like my 2nd home now, but in the begining it war horrible....Just trie to get along with it. And uhm i just added a couple of songs to my library and they're tagged exactly the way as in another program. So did u use windows mp or something?? iTunes reads id3 tags perfectly AND: if i add a file to itunes it directly copies it to a other part of my harddisk and sorts it filteren on artist/album.....
I never liked iTunes on the PC, but it was only when I switched to the mac that I realised just how great it is. I don't even use playlists as I prefer to listen to albums. But even if you don't like iTunes, you can use winamp for it. But having said that, winamp's music library is identical to iTunes's IIRC. Although my pet hate of iTunes is that you can't set it to monitor a folder and automatically import songs from it. Its quite annoying when you have all your media on a fileserver and use it from different machines.
