Thanks Darcy,
Let me tell yah, I ocasionally like to throw my entire collection on
and listen, but over the past few years I've become an extremely
liniar listener. This is because I've taken a huge interest in music
albums overall, how the songs relate to one another, and whether or
not an album or an artist's entire collection of music sounds good or
whether the radio singles are a floock. I don't listen to very many
artists wwho don't impress me about %95 of the time, and I'm getting
pretty hard to impress.
I've also developed an interest in audience recorded live shows. The
novalty of these is usually in hearing the entire show as a whole, the
way the band communicates with the audience, and the different
placement and arrangement of the songs. A great big list of albums
does make a great shuffle on ocasion, but a jiant set of live shows
almost never does. It also doesn't help that live shows are always
distributed in lossless audio, and iTunes doesn't support flac. I
also listen to audiobooks which are liniar by definition. No matter
what I'm listening to though, I never want to rate it, sort it, search
it, browse it, see it's album artwork in a mini browser, or get
meriads of information about it. I want to turn it on and enjoy the
music. Anything else is a waste, smiles.
Now I'm not swearing off iTunes, although it continues to annoy me at
every turn, despite the fact that I'm constantly going in and tweeking
preferences. I never had to do that in winamp by the way.
For example, thanks to some help from the list, I've got iTunes
downloading my podcast audiobooks from http://www.podiobooks.com.
It's downloading the things in almost, but not quite backwards order.
Episode 1 comes in first, then the final episode, then the third to
last episode, then the second last episode, then all the rest nicely
sorted in descending order. Two different books from two different
authors have done this now. To be fare, I have downloaded podiobooks
that had file names that put them in the rong order when the book
finished downloading, but they were both from the same author, and I'm
assuming they corrected the problem by now. So I probably have iTunes
missconfigured somehow and maybe some one will be able to tell me just
how to fix it, but that will make the third or fourth time in the last
two weeks some one has delivered me from my iTunes woes.
Honestly, I'm glad it's working out for so many of you, and I'm not
saying it's broken or trying to denigrate your preferences, but it's
looking like more trouble than it's worth here for what I want it to do.
Best,
Erik
erik burggraaf
Certified Technician
Assistive Computing LTD Support and training
Sales department: 888-828-2445
Support and Training: 888-255-5194
Email: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Website coming soon
On 19-May-08, at 3:36 PM, Darcy Burnard wrote:
Hi Eric. I definitely understand where you're coming from. Before
itunes became accessible, I was a die hard winamp user. I would
hear about itunes from sighted people, and it sounded like overkill
for what I needed. Now though, I love itunes, and couldn't even
conceive of the idea of going back to winamp. I'm not saying this
will be the same for everyone, just that it was for me. I found
that itunes really fits how I listen to music. I'll explain.
I have an airport express hooked up to my stereo, so I have itunes
streaming music to the express nearly all the time. I listen to a
lot of different types of music, and I like to not know what's
coming up next, so I generally keep it set on shuffle. However,
sometimes I might feel a little more selective, so I won't want to
hear everything in my library. Maybe I will just want stuff from a
specific decade, or a specific genre. Or maybe even music from a
specific decade within a specific genre. Sometimes I like to hear
music that I haven't heard in a while. With the itunes browser and
smart playlists, I can do all this with almost no effort.
Anyway, I guess my point is that if you listen to a lot of music,
and you don't want to be bothered selecting each track manually,
then itunes might be worth a second look. One thing I would suggest
is to turn on the browser. You'll find it under the view menu. As
for audio books, look for another message from me on that subject.
Darcy
On 18-May-08, at 11:34 AM, erik burggraaf wrote:
Hi Cara,
I'm a pretty new mac user, and so maybe some of this is just that
it doesn't work like my old stuff did, but I loved the method of
winamp and it's over all interface and functionality. Where-as
ITunes seems more like going back to windows media player or even
musicmatch.
Take a week or two ago when I had to ask where the fast forward and
rewind controls were. They don't appear anywhere in the menues, so
I was stumped. What other features might I be missing in that
regard?
Now, when I opened a file Winamp would play it. When I opened a
selection of files or a folder winamp would playlist it. It would
save those things if I wanted it to, but only if I told it to.
ITunes works backwards. You have to load your ITunes library. It
will play a file or selection if I open it in finder, but not
without placing it in the library and adding it to the main play
list. I find that rediculously clumsy. It keeps track of a lot of
information I don't care about, such as my own personal ratings for
things.
Here's a case where this got really in my way. I bought "A Civil
Campaign" by Lois M Bujold some weeks ago from Emusic. It was a 15
disc audiobook and it came in over 360 track by track files.
ITunes imported the entire 360 files into my music playlist and
dumped them right in with my albums. I tried to seperate the book
out by making a new play list from the files, but all that did was
make an extra layer of pointers to the files in my music playlist
in my library. So, to listen to my book I have,
*1 copy in my emusic download folder,
*one copy in my ITunes library,
*one set of pointers in the main music play list,
*one set of pointers in the new play list for the book files.
Mercy! God save me if I had an IPod, or I'd have a copy on there
too most likely. Using winamp I could just open the book from my
downloads folder and it would go until I opened something else. I
have to clean up the ITunes library to get rid of the extra copy
after every book, and at 360 files per book that's rather
inconvenient. At least when I moved to Toronto very quickly at the
beginning of april I had a few albums here because I'd played them
in ITunes and it added them to library on the fly, but I really
don't want it to do this with my audiobooks.
Now we have this issue where iTunes doesn't support flac, and it
doesn't support ogg, and so now I'm looking at VLC player, or at
least, I will shortly. But I don't really have a desire to have
two media players. Even under windows I refused to install real,
quicktime, and all the other junk they want you to have. It
doesn't appeal to my minimalist nature.
So maybe it's just me, but I'm really not sold on ITunes. I
haven't found any of it particularly inaccessible. I just don't
like the way it goes about it's business.
Best,
erik burggraaf
Certified Technician
Assistive Computing LTD Support and training
Sales department: 888-828-2445
Support and Training: 888-255-5194
Email: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Website coming soon
On 17-May-08, at 4:07 PM, Cara Quinn wrote:
Strange / clumsy? -Am curious here, what you mean?
Would ya mind elaborating?… Thanks so much and perhaps we might
help make it better.
Smiles,
Cara :)
On May 17, 2008, at 11:25 AM, erik burggraaf wrote:
Hi friends,
What's the preferred method of playing flac files on the mac?
The flac website has sugestions, but I'd rather get something
tried and accessible. Apparently iTunes doesn't support the
format and won't any time soon.
Actually, I've been thinking an alternative player might be nice
all around. ITunes has been doing more or less what I want, but
in what seems to me an awefully strange and clumsy way.
Best,
Erik
erik burggraaf
Certified Technician
Assistive Computing LTD Support and training
Sales department: 888-828-2445
Support and Training: 888-255-5194
Email: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Website coming soon
---
View my Online Portfolio at:
http://www.onemodelplace.com/CaraQuinn
