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

I never really got the hang of itunes, probably because I don't buy music from Apple. Mostly I import music from CDs, or I download podcasts and the like.

Can someone tell me how I am meant to organise music and audio files and play them? As far as I can tell, itunes just lumps them all in the 'library' although if the collection of music comes with tags it will keep them organised by album. But for copied CDs, or podcasts, often there isn't any useful tag so I end up with lots of files all mixed up.

I've also got a whole bunch of folders that are albums from back ups of previous versions, but I can't figure out an easy way to get them to play (I didn't have this problem with earlier versions). Do I have to import each one manually?

Is there a reason the itunes creates copies of every file I play?

Is there a better audio player? I've just tried VLC but it plays one track and then stops

Hi kea

when you import from a CD iTunes copies all the tracks to your hard drive sorted by artist and album. In iTunes itself you will find all the tracks in the Library which will be sorted into Music, Films, TV Programmes, Podcasts, Books, Apps, Radio etc.

In Music you can sort the tracks by columns. If you click the Artist column it should lump artists together. Then select all the tracks of an album and press shift, command and N to create a playlist of that album.

If you download music from the internet and then use iTunes to import to Library it will copy the download to the iTunes Music folder. You can stop it doing this in iTunes Preferences, Advanced and unselect the Copy files to iTunes Library button.

Here is a screen shot showing some of what is above - http://picasaweb.google.com/100111268881766100114/ITunes?authuser=0&feat=directlink

Hope that helps a bit.

t.

Hi turvy,

Yes I understand all that, but that's only true if you are importing commercially formatted CDs, or presumably buying from itunes. I listen to alot of audio that I download to my desktop as mp3 files. Itunes has no way of sorting those and just lumps them in with all the other detritus in the Music section of the library (and actually it uses itunes Media, the Music folder itself is empty).

Most of what I listen to ends up in the Unknown Artist folder, and at the moment it even seems to be copying music with adequate tags to there.

ok, I've just dumped the Itunes folder and restarted the application, so I'm working with a clean slate.

How do I play music in itunes that I have stored in folders on my desktop?

How do I play other audio, likewise?

Ok, I figured out some of it...

File ---> Add to Library (or command O) ----> select album folder ---> Open

About a third of those albums end up as 'unknown album' so,

Select all the tracks for that album in the itunes window ---> Get Info ---> type in Artist and Album names ---> save. Now I have all albums in the itunes library in a way that itunes can organise.

But, any time I play a file from my desktop, it gets loaded in the the library music section (even if it's not music). This means the library ends up full of crap (files I only wanted to listen to once).

I see what you are saying. I was going to say that you can edit the iTunes info to categorise and sort but you have figured that out.

As for the files that you only want to listen to once and get rid of all you can do is delete them from iTunes and when it asks you whether you want to move the original file to the Trash say yes. That's what I have done for a long time. Sadly the default player of MP3 files on the Mac is iTunes. You can launch QuickTime player and open the files directly from that and there are other players out there. I'll have a root round and see what I can find.

t.

I just remembered that this piece of freeware (Perian) - http://downloads.cnet.co.uk/view/mp3-and-audio-software/perian-39390601/ lets QuickTime play many more file formats.

MPEG Streamclip - http://downloads.cnet.co.uk/view/mp3-and-audio-software/mpeg-streamclip-39355011/ is also a useful piece of freeware that does all sorts with video file formats but will play different file types without the conversion function being used. I tend to use it to convert video to play on various different generations of iPods.

t.

Thanks turvy. I think there's been changes between Tiger and Leopard, or just itunes updates, that have made it less functional than before (I didn't have so much trouble on the old TIger machine, although it was still a bit clunky).

Do you know if there is a way to group by different kinds of audio? eg keeping podcasts separate from music? At the moment I am using the genre tags.

If a podcast is downloaded by iTunes it should appear in the Podcast section of the Library. If that is not showing go to iTunes preferences, General and tick the button that will show it in the Library.

I'm not sure how your set-up deals with non-iTunes podcast downloads. I'm using Snow Leopard on a white MacBook at the moment. Safari and Firefox both open mp3 files with the QuickTime plugin. Safari will offer to open with iTunes if I right click the file, Firefox doesn't.

If I download the file I can import it to iTunes and it goes in the library as a music file. If I Get Info on the file and go to the options tab I can change the Media Kind to Podcast and iTunes immediately puts it in the Podcast section of the Library. (I love this because I'm learning things myself as I go along!)

I know it's a bit of a faff (as we say int' North of England) but it will allow you to organise things a bit.

t.

I'm on Snow Leopard too. I don't buy anything from itunes (and rarely use their free stuff), which is probably the problem. It used to be a more general audio player, now it seems much more designed for itunes buyers.

Thanks for the Podcast tips, that's really good It is totally faff of Apple though I'm not sure how audio files get tagged when they are created, and whether 'podcast' has a technical definition that included certain kinds of tags. It seems bizarre that I would have to manually retag every audio file I listen to.

I'm also not sure about deleting files from the library each time. Sometimes I might listen to a file once, other times 3 or 4 times, other times I keep the file permanently. There doesn't seem to be a straightforward way of managing that. Maybe it's easier if one is getting podcasts from itunes.


(and while I'm moaning about Apple, here's the epitomy of their stupidity: itunes Help is only available if you are online. Yes, Apple the company that apparently spearheaded portable devices thinks that everyone always had access to the internet all the time and would never need to consult itunes help when not online )

> I've just tried VLC but it plays one track and then stops.

I'm pretty sure VLC can be configured to do playlists. I know you can tell it to open a folder, and it'll scan the folder for any files it can play, and then play them. It does that on Windows and Ubuntu, anyway. I assume it behaves similarly on a Mac.

TRiG.

"I've just dumped the Itunes folder and restarted the application, so I'm working with a clean slate"

That's an excellent idea. I had to do that, and once I had I found iTunes far easier to understand and use.

As for those one-off file plays, I offer the following possibilities:

1. have another mp3 player (a small, lean player) set as your system default, so that if you just double click an mp3, iTunes doesn't open - something else does. This makes it so that if you want to add it to the iTunes library, you have to do so deliberately.

2. if you must use iTunes to play one off files, have the discipline to tag them properly.

If you tend to have a lot of randomly got hold of stuff that isn't part of albums, well, MAKE it part of an album. If you've got 30 tracks that iTunes thinks are "Unknown track" by "Unknown artist", but you know who and what they are and they're all cheesy 80s pop, then get a bit of 300x300 pixel artwork that screams "cheesy 80s pop", select all those tunes, and mark them all as being in the album "cheesy 80s pop", paste in the artwork, have the album artist as "Various Artists" and edit the info for each track separately for the track artist. Time consuming, but you only need to do it once.

Another tip I've learned at some cost of time is: don't add twenty (or two thousand...) albums to your iTunes library at once, because odds are good that many if not most of them will be wrongly tagged in some way. If you add one album and it turns out to add as twenty separate tracks by "Unknown Artist", you can spot that instantly and fix it in about sixty seconds. If you add twenty albums and half of them do that... well, good luck sorting it out.

I used to be a hater, but after I burned my music collection to the ground and started from scratch with iTunes (after having struggled with an iPod nano for about a year) I came to love it. Quite apart from anything else, why would you get podcasts by any other medium? The store organises them automagically. (Then again I've never tried to get them from anywhere else, and if your favourite cast isn't in the store I guess...)

Anyhoo, I hope that helps...

iTunes can subscribe to any podcast, anywhere. It doesn't have to be listed in the iTunes store.

So can many many other players, mind you.

TRiG.