---------- Original message ---------- Subject: Re: iTunes shuffle question Date: Montag, 7. September 2009N From: Bruce Johnson <[email protected]> To: [email protected]
> On Sep 6, 2009, at 3:10 AM, Mac User #330250 wrote: > > Naming files in a specific order using the filenames is a simple but > > working > > solution. > > Yep. And I might as well just manually build the playlists from my CD > or record player to my cassette recorder. There's many REASONS I'm > using a computer; one is to make the COMPUTER do the dull, boring > tasks of ensuring that files are properly named and organized how I > want. Different strokes, i guess. What is simple and what is not seems to be a personal matter. It could be simple to just rename a few files manually and that's it. It could be simple to write a script or search for a proper program (which will probably take a reasonable amount of time, depending on a specific user's experience level) to rename thousands of files. I was just saying that filling a mobile player with songs that you want to be played in a specific order can be easily achieved one way or the other, depending on what the user finds to be his personal solution. And ONE way was the renaming way, a very simple (in the KISS sense) way, because it will work. > > If you use the files on a mobile device where they are not meant to > > be transferred yet to another storage or shared with friends -- > > that's a KISS > > solution, I'd say... > > The problem here is that your solution is ignoring the BUILT-IN > solution to all this, which is that the .mp3 format specification > INCLUDES all this information, as part of the file metadata, *built > into the file*. Yes. I like metadata! > Far too many people got used to manually managing files because > early implementations of MP3 players did not deal with the mp3 > metadata, and WAAAAY to many people got used to stripping MP3's down > to meta-data-less 64k encoded files so they would be small in the > early Wild West days of Napster and Limewire where the object was to > collect as many songs as possible; actually LISTENING to the music > was secondary or tertiary. Who would do such a terrible thing? Downloading stuff from Napster and Limewire war/is illegal! Unless you pay for it (like with Napster how it is today). > I mean, bang paths were KISS, too, but you don't see those in use any > more, do you? POKE and PEEK were simple, and you could make an Apple > II do some amazing things with 'em, but we've sort of moved on. Heh? I'm not so deep into Apple history... > Telling someone asking a simple question about iTunes that's fixable > via a menu selection* to switch to a different program and manually > maintain playlists by manually managing filenames is not simple. > > *KISS in action: that menu option NEVER shows any ambiguity; there's > only ever one option. It turns shuffle off if it's on, or on if it's > off, there's not even the check mark we've come to expect for menu > toggles...which is decidedly un-KISS-like. The proper behavior would > be to change the menu item dynamically like iTunes does. We only > recognize that check mark kludge because we've been trained to. Think > about it. The system is maintaining metadata about the state of that > menu item...it has to, to display the checkbox. It's not harder to > change the wording of the menu item to reflect its current state than > it does to display a checkbox. > > So why do we use checkboxes? Because in the says of 9" and 12" screens > we needed to minimize all control elements as much as possible to > preserve as much screen space as possible for the actual working area. > > It was a kludge, the best compromise between complicated (we have to > teach users what this checkbox means) and the simple (just have the > menu item say what it does!), the problem is that the kludge lead to > menus being largely static, which is how everyone learned to use > computer onscreen menus. > > So when menus actually work like iTunes do, people lose track of > what's where, because they've memorized the layout of menus, not > understood what they do, so menu items that change freak people out. > > I see this all the time day to day supporting a college full of people. Nice. I don't use iTunes. It used to be very complicated when it goes to managing metadata. It may have an intuitive way - like Mac OS X has - but what it does in the background (in the directories where all the music files are) is not very transparent. Sorry, no, not for me. I like to know what's going on. And then there's always this feeling of being pulled into Apple's iTunes shop. Where, BTW, the songs used to be DRM-tagged. This is someting I don't appreciate at all. I've heard they nowerdays changed to DRM-free. Okay, so maybe I'll have a look once again, but I doubt I will since only Windows and Mac OS are supported by iTunes and I am using Linux as my primary operating system. A web shop (with out proprietary Flash) would be a wiser way to reach the masses. Cheers, Andreas --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ You received this message because you are a member of G-Group, a group for those using G3, G4, and G5 desktop Macs - with a particular focus on Power Macs. 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