Ok, bear with me: I hate the way songs are organized in Itunes. I wanted to be able to go in Songs and have everything alphabetized by artist and then song like this: John Lennon - Imagine. Or by titles I create like: 80's - Europe - Final Countdown. Now, if I ever have tag info, Itunes organizes by song name first in the song list. So basically, my solution was to delete ALL tag info so that songs show up as they do on my computer. This works well for navigating to songs in the song list. My problem is this: I'd like to be able to go into Albums and/or Artists and have bands organized there as well in case I just want listen from those (potential) lists. Ina perfect world, I'd be able to add full albums into Albums and either not have them listed at all under songs (probably not possible) or have them list the way I want in Songs: artist dash song. Is there any way to make this happen? Some cool Ipod hacking/organizing software? Thanks for any tips.
If organization is what you are looking for and you do not have a Mac Media Monkey is for you. It is shareware. I will give you fair warning you will need to remove itunes before you use MM to sync your ipod. You may be tempted to use it because of all the sync options. Itunes will attack your ipod and then claim there is something wrong. You figure it was a bad sync. It is not. itunes will try to punish the unfaithful. If you have good ear bus like Philips or Koss and high quality mp3s you may be able to hear the difference between an itunes sync and a MM sync. itunes converts high quality mp3s to 128 m4as behind the sceens. ipods are not smart enough to downgrade mp3s once they are loaded on your pod. If you are into HiFi vs LoFi music you will be plesently surprised to how good you pod can sound. MM has no hidden agendas. It it only concerned with making a wonderful product. That is so refreshing! I use PowerAmp for ripping and file conversions even though I have the paid for version of MM. I prefer to use the very best tools if I can afford them.
Thanks for the tips. I had tried MM but was a little scared at learning a whole new program. But Itunes made my decison for me: All of a sudden the my file names were cut off if they werwe too long, both in Itunes AND in my desktop folder. Now I have to go through 4,000 songs and make sure they're named properly. Media Monkey it is.
MM used to use access as a back end access is far more robust then the apple backend. Access was unstable, bad random things like you experianced can happen, in moderatly large libraries 100 G. They went to a SQL engine. That is something to behold. Libraries much bigger the 200 G are nothing for that baby! There will be a bit of a learning curve but MM follows all PC conventions. I found it much easier to learn but I never really learned itunes. I don't think you can rename the file names in MM unless you run a script. It allows you to execute VB and or SQL scripts from inside MM. I believe you can high-light the tunes in the library to be effected by the script. That is way cool! Tag editors can rebuild file nams from tag info. Of course old stuff you might find with LW often does not have tag info. I could say just grab you back up but I do not have close to good back ups for my own. My library is way too dynamic for that, so I say. I have yet to figure out a good system for incremental back ups. That is a lot of crap to back up and nearly impossible to replace! Make sure you use MM 3 and not MM2. MM3 came out about 6 months ago. You can not import from MM2 into MM3.
Thanks for the tips. I'm not looking forward to hours of tagging, but I am a little excited about the promise of newly organized files.
Failure at every turn. I cannot understand Media Monkey. I can't understand how it's organizing and how to organize it it. I'm stuck with Itunes.
You are just overwhelmed by all the choices you have. Once you get over the shock of so many more choices you will like it. That will take about an hour or two after you figure it out. Maybe the 'All' sub view could have you confused. The views are in higharchy. Let's use the artist view. You have 12 beatles albums and they all all spelled 'the Beatles' consistantly. You will have 'All' and the 12 album names. If you click on 'All' you see all their stuff. If you click on 'Help' you see the songs for 'Help'. 'All' is very useful when you want to play 10 beatles songs on 8 different albums. Then you use the all view directly under the Beatles. I suggest you use the location view first. That follows the way you arranged your file folders. It is the best view for poorly tagged tunes. It has 9 different views while itune only has one (artist, album) MM has that view. If you use that view it should navigate like itunes. Your original complaint was you wanted to view music by location. MM does that. You can only use one view at a time. The views are controled by the view selecter window on the left. It works like windows explorer.
