iTunes or inport?
 

I have inported many cds into my computer. There have been occasions where the tracks are seperated into addition/seperate albums. In the frustration of renaming tracks/albums I find it more less stressful to just buy the album on iTunes. Not only do I alleviate the problem with track names but also not having to search for album artwork, however, there has been certain times where Itunes has the incorrect artwork.

I don't know what it's like overthere but overhere downloading the album is completely legal if you own the original one. So you don't even HAVE to buy them, you can just download them. I have most of my music on vinyl and recording every track to the PC would take a lot of time, so I just downloaded everything, completely legal :)

I say uninstall iTunes, getting rid of it was one of the wisest decisions I've made. There's far better media players out there than iTunes such as Winamp, foobar2000 and Media Monkey that let you manage your media library a lot better. I've had those problems with iTunes you've mentioned and to be honest it's just better to rename tracks and albums manually even though it's time consuming. iTunes never gets everything right.

Winamp does do quite a great job finding the titles to the tracks :).
But i guess all these programs use the same Gracenote Database.

Do not talk to me about itunes. I mistakenly updated the latest version and spent a day and a half trying to get a mere 20 gigs of music onto my ipod touch.

I have music that shows up in the album section but not the artist section. Some albums have been put on three times and some are listed but have no files. If you have a band for example Sharon Jones and the Dap Kings, it won't recognise the album if it comes up with '&' instead of 'and'. Surely they have the software to recognise them as the same thing? Many albums missing track one and put into a separate album and the amount of times I have added artwork, correct tags, profiles etc only to find that what's in my itunes folder doesn't end up on my ipod.

Considering it is supposed to be this all encompassing database of music it is seriously flawed and even if you have one track with a space before the bands name it won't put it into the same album. HATE HATE HATE. I can't get on with mediamonkey either so that's a no no for me.

The only major problem I've found with itunes is that when you have multiple albums with the same title (f.ex: Dalek's Absence, Snowman's Absence, and Paper Route's Absence), it will group them all together in your coverflow, so that playing one inevitably plays them all.

I wish I was geeky enough to grasp foobar and really make the most of it.

EDIT: To be fair, I use itunes for the sole purpose of syncing my ipod with the music I have purchased.

I had major problems with iTunes when I was using it on a PC, and I found that with each new version of iTunes, it became more difficult to use with a PC.

I bought a mac book for the sole purpose of managing my music collection on iTunes, and all my problems went away. I uploaded all the CD's that I currently had and I now purchase most of my music on iTunes. I have not had any of the problems mentioned in the previous posts. You can import whatever artwork you want, you can re-name albums or songs to arrange them anyway you want, and in terms of albums where the songs are indexed but should all run together you can choose zero gap in between songs when you import them. Plus, you can import your CD's and downloads using the loss-less option, so the sound quality is great. I hated ITunes for a while, but now I'm a huge proponent. I also have Apple TV, which streams your music collection through your TV making it into a virtual jukebox for a party. One trick on organizing your collection is to select the album icon view (not cover-flow) from there, you can choose to arrange by three parameters. I go by artist, album, year, and it works perfect; then I switch back to cover flow and it maintains the order.

The only thing I miss is the tangible aspect of a CD or album, so I've started collecting used records again from a local record store that sells a ton of used records all for a dollar.

I have this exact same problem. I restored my Touch yesterday and it's fine now, but I know that the minute I add a new artist, the alphabetical ordering will be way out of wack.

There's a trick to the ordering. You can't be in the cover flow view. I'm traveling and don't have my iTunes in front of me, but I think you have to choose the album icon view, then you can arrange by multiple parameters and choose the order: Artist, album, year, etc. in any order you want. Then you can switch back to cover flow.

If you Google search it, there are good instructions.

Why is everyone buying i-devices if iTunes is such a pain in the ass?

I use iTunes on my Mac and find it pretty reliable. The only real issue I have is sorting on compilations but as I rarely buy compilation albums it's not really a worry. I do wish there was a manual search for cover art though as that can be a bit hit or miss.

There is: google image search. :)

Yeah that's what I try if the art isn't in their database.

Decent HD space and the fact that I can get decent Wi-Fi and addictive games was the reason I bought my iPod touch primarily and for some reason it seems to find full episodes of documentaries easier via the inbuilt YouTube app than the site itself which is a boon for me in the evening whilst the usual crap is on T.V.

On the downside there is obviously iTunes, the godawful headphones that come with it (ditched them after day one) and the equalizer presets for music are crap too. Surely we can have manual equalizers? Not everyone is tone deaf! I turn the equalizer off.

Little things like internet banking, email, ebay and weather apps are genuinely useful and more compact and concise than the full grade options a lot of the time and easily accessible.

Home sharing is handy too so I can access my full collection on my iPod while I am at home without having to copy the songs onto my iPod.

When you download a mp3 from iTunes how do you know what version you're getting?

If you search a particular song title it will list all the versions with artist and album. If you are looking for a particular version you can click on the album to read more about it or listen to a preview of the song. Is that what you mean?

I also find iTunes a useful way to discover new songs/ artists by following the "people also bought" links. If I feel like exploring a particular artist's catalogue the previews are handy for working out which albums might be more to my liking.

That seems to make sense. But then I thought; Isn't that just a tiny iPad then, or an iPhone without the Phone bit?

I've already pointed this out before but that's one of the things I hate about the iPod. It's expensive, it can do a lot and I know apple built in some pretty decent soundcards in their iMacs and such. But the iPod, compared to other 'decent' mp3 players like Creatives, Logitech, Philips or whatever, sounds... not good at all. And I mean connected to an audio rig, not based on the sound of the (indeed godawful) headphones. It's a pity. They sort of missed the point. It can do so much, but in the end as a music player it's not that brilliant in comparison.
Ghehe, makes me think of the Samsung Galaxy S. I'm not sure what it's like overthere, but overhere these phones sound awful. When someone with a galaxy S calls me, I have a hard time hearing what they say. It runs a nice OS, it has a pretty good camera, it's got a brilliant screen but for ****s' sake it's a friggin' phone! How can it do ANYTHING except being a decent phone? I just don't get it.

I honestly wish there were better music player options than itunes for Mac users and occasionally I'll go on web excursions seeking them out, but to no avail. I have Songbird, which is decent, but you would think that someone would develop a third party piece of software as a strong, viable alternative to iTunes. The room for improvement is immense.

VLC Mplayer works on a mac, doesn't it?
It's simple, but at least it's not sluggish :)

I have to confess, A lot of what I dislike about the itunes alternatives that are out there have to do with their aesthetics. I like being able to see the cover art of my collection. There are other things, but very little of it has to do with functionality.

When you say version, do you mean version of sound file? If so, you can set your preferences to download whatever quality you want. Mp3's are pretty low quality. Apple's default is AAC (or some acronym like that), which is higher quality. I download in loss-less which is the best quality, but it takes up more space.

I also think I'm one of the few ITunes proponents here, but it works really well for me. Immediate access to all your songs, syncing to Ipods, apple TV, cover art, and organization all make it unbeatable in my opinion.

Haha, I'm the kind of person who goes: "I don't want al that crap, just slows the software down, go away with your stupid album art and fancy effects".
"Grey is good" ;)

I think it is not necessary to buy iTunes music, maybe you can use the music converter - TuneSolo Apple Music Converter to store the songs in MP3, so that your song ID information will not be wrong.