iTunes 4.7
Posted October 26th, 2004 @ 10:24pm by Erik J. Barzeski
Thoughts, in no random order.
- Synching photos in iTunes is stupid. That's my opinion and I'm stickin' to it.
- "Find Duplicates" is dumb dumb dumb. It matches song names and that's it. Who cares if they're different lengths, genres, albums, artists, and ratings. Who cares?!?!
- "Keep Mini Player on top of all other windows" is great, but then again I use Synergy.
- Putting an "iPod" item in the preferences is nice.
- The ability to turn off Party Shuffle and Radio is both nice and again something I won't use.
- I need to figure out how to do those "Artist Alerts" things.*
- Unrelated, but worth saying: $29 for a fucking sock for your iPod? Ha!
* Figured it out. Turns out Artist Alerts are easy: go to an artist's page in the iTMS and look for "Artist Alert" in the top right area. Click it. Done.
Then you're offered the choice to get an Artist Alert for all artists in your purchase history. I'd turn this on (just to see how it went) if I was sure I could turn it off at some point. It's easy to turn this on and off. Just "Manage Artist Alerts" somewhere in the iTMS.
Donate Life
Posted 26 Oct 2004 at 11:41pm #
it is $29 for MORE than one sock.
Posted 26 Oct 2004 at 11:50pm #
I really only downloaded it because of the "Find Duplicates" feature. It's useful, but yeah, a MD5 checksum would probably be the best they could reasonably get, and then everyone would complain how slow it is.
The feature is welcome even if it's only simplistic - if it automatically deleted things, then I would be a lot more concerned.
Posted 27 Oct 2004 at 12:11am #
It's $29 for a pack of all six colors of socks. That's still $5 a sock, but I was ready to buy a single sock for $30 😉
Posted 27 Oct 2004 at 12:13am #
I'm underwhelmed by the iPod photo...right down to its awkwardly unimaginative name. And what's with the sock??? Sheesh! The guys at Marware can sleep well tonight knowing that this is their new competition.
Posted 27 Oct 2004 at 5:15am #
I rather like the idea of carrying photos around on my iPod. Esp. with the cable I can share with family during road trips. Look at this scenario (which is highly-specific, I understand): you get Belkin's photo reader gadget (presuming they share the same folder for this stuff) and take a thousand pictures on a trip and save them to the iPod. Get back to wherever you're staying and hook the 'pod up to whatever TV is handy and poke through them all.
Or copy your iPhoto stuff over and just carry the 'pod over to family gatherings and do the same. The TV is the largest monitor any house will have (except for people buying that 30" thing) so it's the better choice. Then, of course, all your music is there for background music.
Just ask any avid TiVo Home Media Option user how great this could be. 🙂 (Yes, me.)
So, yeah, it's specialized (and priced accordingly) but for those of us in the rabid picture-taking-and-sharing mood it's wonderful. And even if not, that album cover stuff is awesome. 🙂
Posted 27 Oct 2004 at 6:03am #
As for the duplicates, it's found at least four full albums I imported with slightly different album names (IMDB's sucked, so I changed it. Couldn't find it so I put it in again). So, in that case, it works out good. There will always be some overlap of song names or what-have-you, but for cases like that it works great.
Posted 27 Oct 2004 at 7:33am #
The ability to turn off Party Shuffle and Radio is both nice and again something I won't use.
That's been in there since 4.6. It's useful on second machines or laptops that you would never really user "Party Shuffle" on or those on dial-up that can't really use "Radio" reliably.
Posted 27 Oct 2004 at 10:15am #
While I agree with Apple that photos seem a less-stupid idea than watching video on a 2" screen, less stupid is still stupid. I can't see any need for myself, at least, to bother getting a new iPod photo. If I want to show slideshows to people on road trips, I can bring my laptop. Or burn a DVD or something.
And I, too, was disappointed in "find duplicates." Running it came up with plenty of false positives whose track lengths weren't the same (different versions, takes, etc of the same song on the same album, or slightly altered versions of the same song on different albums shouldn't count as "duplicates", since I don't want to delete them if they're significantly different). I'd also like to see the feature of allowing a song being classified by multiple albums. If I have a song on the original album, and also on some sort of compilation album, it would be nice if it remained in both playlists yet still allowed me to get rid of the duplicate. As it is now, it's not going to save me that much disk space vs. the pain of incomplete playlists, so it looks like it's time to buy a 250GB drive for my mp3s, as the library rapidly approaches 96% of my 160GB drive. Or I could stop buying new albums and downloading iTMS songs. Yeah, right. That's gonna happen...
Posted 27 Oct 2004 at 11:14am #
I agree, mns, that it would be nice to be able to have the same song file(and playcount) listed under two or more albums. I realize that this could get really hairy really quick if not implemented well, but from my experience, Apple is usually pretty good in that department.
However, I really like the find duplicates as it is. I import a lot of mixes my friends make, so my duplicates are very rarely exactly alike. So the Find Duplicates is a welcome feature.