On 6/10/06, Philip Meyer <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
I'd agree with some of those points but not others. I tend to rip music outside iTunes and then import in. Organising everything by artist/album/track seems to make sense to me. Having iTunes organise your music is optional and you can specify where it's library sits (but like pretty much all windows apps it defaults to C). the compilation treatment works for itunes and the ipod - why would you ever navigate your music by directory?
I've a 2nd gen iPod which i've stopped using because of battery life issues, a winmobile2005 phone (which i use to play music off a memory card via win media player) and an iRiver T30. The latter two need to be synched via Windows Media Player and it's horrible.
iTunes is wonderfully responsive - type the first few letters of an artist/album/song in and the 'spreadsheet' view instantly shrinks to the relevant entries. finding stuff is a breeze. Alternatively click on the genre/artist lsit at the top and find stuff that way. A search in windows media player results in a few seconds of uncertainty as to whether it's crashed. the web interface to my SB3 is much the same.
What iTunes lacks is the idea of a now playing list - click a track and it plays it. Want to set something up to follow? Sorry, time to create a playlist and start over.
I really like that aspect of Slimserver - via the web interface i can start with one song, add a musicip selection, remove all tracks by a particular artist. really good. But it isnt very responsive, icons are too small, the layout confuses new users.
This is why review after review in the mainstream press marks down the Squeezebox against Roku (most recently in the June issue of Stuff in the UK). I've high hopes for 6.5.
Just for the record, I absolutely detest Apple iPod and iTunes. It's just not designed for Windows properly.
The user interface in iTunes is horrible. I hate the fact that all music is in one massive spreadsheet display, rather than structured and viewable by artist/album/genre, etc like Slimserver and Foobar. I can't see what all the fuss is about regarding playlists either.
My wifes music collection was organised quite nicely. After she ran up iTunes (I left her to it - bad choice!), by default it converted a load of her ripped wma albums to aac format, creating copies of the music on my C drive, rather than another disk where I usually keep all music files. Confused the hell out of her. It split up compilation albums, so that each track was stored in a folder for each artist (rather than in a folder for the album). I think this is why compilation album logic within SlimServer was awkward to handle, because it had to allow for iTunes. It took a while to reorganise things and get iTunes working with music stored in the correct place.
I'd agree with some of those points but not others. I tend to rip music outside iTunes and then import in. Organising everything by artist/album/track seems to make sense to me. Having iTunes organise your music is optional and you can specify where it's library sits (but like pretty much all windows apps it defaults to C). the compilation treatment works for itunes and the ipod - why would you ever navigate your music by directory?
I've a 2nd gen iPod which i've stopped using because of battery life issues, a winmobile2005 phone (which i use to play music off a memory card via win media player) and an iRiver T30. The latter two need to be synched via Windows Media Player and it's horrible.
iTunes is wonderfully responsive - type the first few letters of an artist/album/song in and the 'spreadsheet' view instantly shrinks to the relevant entries. finding stuff is a breeze. Alternatively click on the genre/artist lsit at the top and find stuff that way. A search in windows media player results in a few seconds of uncertainty as to whether it's crashed. the web interface to my SB3 is much the same.
What iTunes lacks is the idea of a now playing list - click a track and it plays it. Want to set something up to follow? Sorry, time to create a playlist and start over.
I really like that aspect of Slimserver - via the web interface i can start with one song, add a musicip selection, remove all tracks by a particular artist. really good. But it isnt very responsive, icons are too small, the layout confuses new users.
This is why review after review in the mainstream press marks down the Squeezebox against Roku (most recently in the June issue of Stuff in the UK). I've high hopes for 6.5.
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