h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

Ah, it is doing something...

It popped up one of those irritating "Initial configuration" dialogs behind my browser window, with no associated tab on the Start bar, so I had no way of knowing it was there... I should have guessed that one, really - bloody QuickTime for Windows did exactly the same thing the first time I installed it on this machine.

Apple might write really pretty software, but their installers suck, big-time.

It's working now; sounds OK, but...

The "Visualiser" isn't as good as the one in Windows Media Player,

The "condensed" display takes up three times the space on my screen that MusicMatch does, and

The three days I spent organising my MP3 collection into descriptive subdirectories has been wasted, as iTunes just shows one huge list of all MP3s in "My Music"; MusicMatch allowed you to select one or more directories, then it would play the contents. iTunes doesn't even acknowledge that a directory structure exists.

In summary, for the way I like to listen to my music, it's an inferior product. The only features it has added to my listening experience is the option to spend money at the iTunes shop...

For a free app, it's pretty good. If I didn't have an Archos Jukebox I would have had to pay for MusicMatch, and the better features probably wouldn't have justified the cost, so I'd be using this rather than WMP. But as long as I have MusicMatch, I think I'll pass...

Here's hoping the uninstall is a little better behaved that QuickTime's - last time I uninstalled a copy of QT it left half its filetypes in limbo instead of restoring them to the previous applications.

I found that the best way to move over to iTunes for Windows is to clear out your old music folders in MusicMatch/Real/MediaCenter and then reload them using iTunes. You then get all of the album, artist and track titles informtion added from the online CDDB. Ripping a CD in iTunes takes a fraction of the time it does in MusicMatch/Real/MediaCenter!

B.

That doesn't solve all the tracks you've carefully categorised in "My Music/jolly" or similar being reordered back with all the other tracks from the original album they came off.

I have NEVER owned anything but a Mac. Started with a Performa 400 (4 plus 80) and moved up to an iMac DV.

At work the company does not appreciate the value of using a Mac based system and have a groaning Windoze NT4 network with the vast majority of users on Win98 (Sit down folks...there are still machines on the network running Win 95!!).

Of course I am a Mac evangelist at work but noboby understands me.

Fear not though...I endure!

They provide me with a laptop as I have to be mobile and work from home on occasions. This is the (alledged) computer to which I refer - a Toshiba Satellite Pro(?) 4600. Luckily one of the systems bods (sadly no longer with the Co.) solved a persistent problem with network/e-mail access and constant crashes by performing a clean install of a stripped-down version od Win98 with none of the crap and gubbins that Mr. Gates insists on bundling with the full install.

This means that crashes are rare compared to the rest of the users on the system. Compared to the Mac with OSX...well? No contest really.


turvy

Ach! Peet! Didn't you click the "browse" button? The one long list slides, down, and you get the coolest auto-categorizing list, based on the MP3 tags. And if you haven't tagged your files, the iTunes interface for doing that is sweet - multiple files at once and auto-fill forms. And if you choose the option in the preferences, iTunes will automatically create a directory structure for you (not flexibly though, it will always be based on artist name followed by album name, some users complain because it also renames the files).

You can resize the "condensed" display to make it smaller by dragging the lower right corner. It still tends to be a bit larger than some of the competitions' displays, but I find those frustratingly small.

I agree the visualizer is not the best, but I've seen it improve then slack off again, then improve again with different releases of iTunes. Apple seems to alternate their development cycle from features, to speed improvements and fixes, then features, etc.

But the killer feature is the music sharing. It's got everyone in my office using iTunes.

You can download other visualisers if you so wish. Mmm sparckels.

HP, I can make it shorter in the X axis, but I can't do anything about the height. MusicMatch shrinks till it can sit within the title bar area of a window, while still having the controls and a scrolling marquee of the track details.

"Browse" is still fixated with Genre, Artist and Album. All I ask of an MP3 player is a tree view of the last directory I accessed, and iTunes singularly fails to provide this. I have many MP3s of old radio shows, which all have Artist as "Various", and no "Album" associated. This means of categorisation sucks for my uses; all it does is make it easier for Apple to categorise your listening habits with a view to selling you things. "Music the way you want it"? Perhaps, but only if you want it the way they provide it. "Any color, as long as it's black" - Henry Ford.

Oooh. It just stuttered in the middle of a "Weird Al" song; that's unforgivable. It's outta here.

It won't off without forcing me to restart my computer. Apple's Windows installers really suck.

You may think I'm being harsh, but the level of hype is directly proportional to the disappointment when you find out it's really nothing special. And according to the XP spec., any 3rd party app that claims XP compatibility *must* install and remove without forcing a restart. Plenty of other software companies manage it, but not, apparently, Apple.

just turvy,

The easiest way to sell Macs to a company manager is to put two eMacs, plus a printer on the corporate network and then let Rendevous auto configure the network connections between them. Show this to your boss and he'll imediately be thinking... "now I can get those computer bods doing sopmething useful, like fixing the e-mail system."

Running a Mac network costs less than running a PC network in the long term (over two years). Managers just have to get over the fact that the machines cost a bit more in the beginning!

B.

You're not being harsh, Peet, but you are nit-picking a little. You can hide the "genre" column in browse view, and selling music was a feature added to iTunes years after iTunes (and it's music categorization method) appeared so you can't really say it is designed to sell music - it goes the other way around, Apple based the music store organization on the iTunes model. Yes, the installer should not force a restart, but then Apple is not alone in that.

It shouldn't skip. That is unforgivable. But on Windows it's really version 1.0, despite it's 4.1 numbering (there are rumors of an update within a week or two, see http://www.macosrumors.com/ and one update was released last night. New point for criticism: I haven't looked, but I'm guessing it's not a patch but a full download of the whole 20Mb again).

I'm not sure I understand your issue about browsing directories, I'll have to take a look at some other mp3 players to see that feature in action, but it seems you are really talking about your preferred way of working not fitting in with the iTunes model. That's just a personal preference. If you use the mp3 tags instead of a directory structure, you could potentially recreate your directory structure there, perhaps by creative use of the "composer" and "genre" tags. I tend to use the smart playlists more to create on-the-fly categories that represent the way I want to see my music. Personally, I like the way iTunes organizes the music automatically. Most of the music I download is pre-tagged, music I rip usually gets tagged correctly by the CDDB and when it's not tagged properly I just retag it instead of dragging files around, so alternate views of the files has not been much of an issue for me.

That said, iTunes is designed for simple use without really needing to think about organizing things. It will not work well for a more advanced user who wants to maintain their own organizational structure or do some things that other tools do. It has a target audience.

And my name de-anagrams to d'Elaphant . I was confused when you starting addressing "HP". I didn't know who that was

I have two problems with iTunes' automatic categorisation as compared to my "stick it in a subdirectory" method. First, as I mentioned, many of my MP3s are old radio shows, such as "the Goons" or "the Shadow", which defy simple categorisation. I may have got Shadow episodes from 10 different websites, each with its own whimsical ID3 tag (or none at all) so they end up scattered through the iTunes listing.

Secondly, for playing on my PC, I find it simpler to fill a directory with shortcuts to a group of MP3 files than it is to maintain a constantly changing playlist. One music track can appear in several categories, with only one copy of the file on the HDD, and shortcuts can be freely dragged between categories. Very simple and elegant, at least as far as one of my hare-brained schemes goes. And yes, I'm complaining that iTunes doesn't let me work the way I want to - that's a legitimate complaint, when my current (and previous) player does.

Did I mention that Apple installers are crap?

The copy of Quicktime that iTunes installed without my permission wasn't removed when I uninstalled iTunes. Furthermore, it's gone and reassociated all my image files (even .PSDs, for God's sake!) with its own image viewer, again without asking me or giving me any configuration options (it was a "silent install") and worst of all it's "upgraded" my full, legitimate Quicktime 3 Media Creators Edition (as supplied with my £500+ Pinnacle DC30+ card) to a playback-only copy of the latest version, with popup "reminders" to pay for the full copy.

B*****ds.

QuickTime isn't unusual in that respect... Real Player is even worse when it comes to install and upgrades.

B.

PS: QuickTime 3 is ancient history now! 5 years is an eon in computing terms. looks like you needed to upgrade.

I could still use QT3 to encode MOVs from Premiere; now I can't. until I get rid of the new "improved" version and reinstall it.

I was getting along nicely with QT3 as my media encoder, and the modern QT browser plugins for playing back web content. Deleting a working, full version of their software, *without asking*, just to install a cut-down copy of the latest version so they can nag you to pay for the full version is unforgivable. I hope someone in authority at Apple is reading this, and that they are in a position to demote or fire the manager who approved this strategy.

I can sympathise... I lost 2 media keys during QuickTime updates. £18 a pop! But the upgrade is worth it, if only for the streaming MPEG 4 playback.

B.

Two of my DivX; - ) players claim to support MPEG-4 streaming; I've never had occasion to try it.

They probably work fine, MPEG-4 is supposed to be an open standard.

I'm surprised the image thing happened to you Peet. I installed iTunes on 3 Windows XP systems, and it asked each time if I wanted to associate the image extensions with Quicktime.

I'm running 2000, and from what I recall I got a box that popped up saying "Installing QuickTime 6.whatever" with a progress bar and a "cancel" button; by the time I realised what was happening the progress was more than a third of the way through, so I figured it was too late to cancel safely. I wouldn't have willingly allowed any of my file associations to be changed.