Hey Eric. I do listen to a lot of random stuff, but at the same time
I do have a lot of albums that simply must be listened to from
beginning to end, so I completely get what you're saying. When I want
to hear a whole album, I simply find it in the browser, press return
on it, and it plays. It seems like this is much fewer keystrokes then
going in to the finder, finding the folder your album is in, and
opening it that way. Now for those album tracks that don't work out
of context, I can set the do not shuffle option on them.
Finally, as for flacs, the web page for the xiph quicktime components
say that they will play flac. I know they play ogg files, but haven't
tried flacs as of yet. You can get the components here.
http://downloads.xiph.org/releases/xiph-qt/xiph-qt-0.1.8.dmg
Anyway, as I said at the top of my first message, itunes works well
for how I listen to music, but it may not for everyone.
Darcy
On 19-May-08, at 9:59 PM, erik burggraaf wrote:
Thanks Darcy,
Let me tell yah, I ocasionally like to throw my entire collection on
and listen, but over the past few years I've become an extremely
liniar listener. This is because I've taken a huge interest in
music albums overall, how the songs relate to one another, and
whether or not an album or an artist's entire collection of music
sounds good or whether the radio singles are a floock. I don't
listen to very many artists wwho don't impress me about %95 of the
time, and I'm getting pretty hard to impress.
I've also developed an interest in audience recorded live shows.
The novalty of these is usually in hearing the entire show as a
whole, the way the band communicates with the audience, and the
different placement and arrangement of the songs. A great big list
of albums does make a great shuffle on ocasion, but a jiant set of
live shows almost never does. It also doesn't help that live shows
are always distributed in lossless audio, and iTunes doesn't support
flac. I also listen to audiobooks which are liniar by definition.
No matter what I'm listening to though, I never want to rate it,
sort it, search it, browse it, see it's album artwork in a mini
browser, or get meriads of information about it. I want to turn it
on and enjoy the music. Anything else is a waste, smiles.
Now I'm not swearing off iTunes, although it continues to annoy me
at every turn, despite the fact that I'm constantly going in and
tweeking preferences. I never had to do that in winamp by the way.
For example, thanks to some help from the list, I've got iTunes
downloading my podcast audiobooks from http://www.podiobooks.com.
It's downloading the things in almost, but not quite backwards
order. Episode 1 comes in first, then the final episode, then the
third to last episode, then the second last episode, then all the
rest nicely sorted in descending order. Two different books from
two different authors have done this now. To be fare, I have
downloaded podiobooks that had file names that put them in the rong
order when the book finished downloading, but they were both from
the same author, and I'm assuming they corrected the problem by
now. So I probably have iTunes missconfigured somehow and maybe
some one will be able to tell me just how to fix it, but that will
make the third or fourth time in the last two weeks some one has
delivered me from my iTunes woes.
Honestly, I'm glad it's working out for so many of you, and I'm not
saying it's broken or trying to denigrate your preferences, but it's
looking like more trouble than it's worth here for what I want it to
do.
Best,
Erik
erik burggraaf
Certified Technician
Assistive Computing LTD Support and training
Sales department: 888-828-2445
Support and Training: 888-255-5194
Email: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Website coming soon
On 19-May-08, at 3:36 PM, Darcy Burnard wrote:
Hi Eric. I definitely understand where you're coming from. Before
itunes became accessible, I was a die hard winamp user. I would
hear about itunes from sighted people, and it sounded like overkill
for what I needed. Now though, I love itunes, and couldn't even
conceive of the idea of going back to winamp. I'm not saying this
will be the same for everyone, just that it was for me. I found
that itunes really fits how I listen to music. I'll explain.
I have an airport express hooked up to my stereo, so I have itunes
streaming music to the express nearly all the time. I listen to a
lot of different types of music, and I like to not know what's
coming up next, so I generally keep it set on shuffle. However,
sometimes I might feel a little more selective, so I won't want to
hear everything in my library. Maybe I will just want stuff from a
specific decade, or a specific genre. Or maybe even music from a
specific decade within a specific genre. Sometimes I like to hear
music that I haven't heard in a while. With the itunes browser and
smart playlists, I can do all this with almost no effort.
Anyway, I guess my point is that if you listen to a lot of music,
and you don't want to be bothered selecting each track manually,
then itunes might be worth a second look. One thing I would
suggest is to turn on the browser. You'll find it under the view
menu. As for audio books, look for another message from me on that
subject.
Darcy
On 18-May-08, at 11:34 AM, erik burggraaf wrote:
Hi Cara,
I'm a pretty new mac user, and so maybe some of this is just that
it doesn't work like my old stuff did, but I loved the method of
winamp and it's over all interface and functionality. Where-as
ITunes seems more like going back to windows media player or even
musicmatch.
Take a week or two ago when I had to ask where the fast forward
and rewind controls were. They don't appear anywhere in the
menues, so I was stumped. What other features might I be missing
in that regard?
Now, when I opened a file Winamp would play it. When I opened a
selection of files or a folder winamp would playlist it. It would
save those things if I wanted it to, but only if I told it to.
ITunes works backwards. You have to load your ITunes library. It
will play a file or selection if I open it in finder, but not
without placing it in the library and adding it to the main play
list. I find that rediculously clumsy. It keeps track of a lot
of information I don't care about, such as my own personal ratings
for things.
Here's a case where this got really in my way. I bought "A Civil
Campaign" by Lois M Bujold some weeks ago from Emusic. It was a
15 disc audiobook and it came in over 360 track by track files.
ITunes imported the entire 360 files into my music playlist and
dumped them right in with my albums. I tried to seperate the book
out by making a new play list from the files, but all that did was
make an extra layer of pointers to the files in my music playlist
in my library. So, to listen to my book I have,
*1 copy in my emusic download folder,
*one copy in my ITunes library,
*one set of pointers in the main music play list,
*one set of pointers in the new play list for the book files.
Mercy! God save me if I had an IPod, or I'd have a copy on there
too most likely. Using winamp I could just open the book from my
downloads folder and it would go until I opened something else. I
have to clean up the ITunes library to get rid of the extra copy
after every book, and at 360 files per book that's rather
inconvenient. At least when I moved to Toronto very quickly at
the beginning of april I had a few albums here because I'd played
them in ITunes and it added them to library on the fly, but I
really don't want it to do this with my audiobooks.
Now we have this issue where iTunes doesn't support flac, and it
doesn't support ogg, and so now I'm looking at VLC player, or at
least, I will shortly. But I don't really have a desire to have
two media players. Even under windows I refused to install real,
quicktime, and all the other junk they want you to have. It
doesn't appeal to my minimalist nature.
So maybe it's just me, but I'm really not sold on ITunes. I
haven't found any of it particularly inaccessible. I just don't
like the way it goes about it's business.
Best,
erik burggraaf
Certified Technician
Assistive Computing LTD Support and training
Sales department: 888-828-2445
Support and Training: 888-255-5194
Email: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Website coming soon
On 17-May-08, at 4:07 PM, Cara Quinn wrote:
Strange / clumsy? -Am curious here, what you mean?
Would ya mind elaborating?… Thanks so much and perhaps we might
help make it better.
Smiles,
Cara :)
On May 17, 2008, at 11:25 AM, erik burggraaf wrote:
Hi friends,
What's the preferred method of playing flac files on the mac?
The flac website has sugestions, but I'd rather get something
tried and accessible. Apparently iTunes doesn't support the
format and won't any time soon.
Actually, I've been thinking an alternative player might be nice
all around. ITunes has been doing more or less what I want, but
in what seems to me an awefully strange and clumsy way.
Best,
Erik
erik burggraaf
Certified Technician
Assistive Computing LTD Support and training
Sales department: 888-828-2445
Support and Training: 888-255-5194
Email: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Website coming soon
---
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