itunes versus winamp

this is an official blog now, I am going to write something about owning an ipod and using itunes. :D (next i discuss the war in iraq!!)

so, i recently purchased an ipod nano a few weeks back (mainly for my planned trip to hawai'i). of course, i ordered it directly from apple.com: it seems that you can get it engraved for no extra cost. if anyone ever finds a black nano on the streets of LA with the initials 'tm' carved on the back (i didn't know what else to put!) then be sure to contact me, and i will give you $10 for it (seems fair to me). Also, due to the huge fuss about the ipod nano's scratching, i haven't seen it. that could be because i cut the plastic protector thing the nano came with to fit the screen and left it on there, but im also careful not to put my nano in my knife sack (i ruined some good books that way, need to get rid of some knives i guess).

which comes to the nature of this post: itunes. i dont like it. in fact, i've been using winamp (i luse windows) since 1999 when i first got my first song off of napster (what was your first song? mine was kurupt-who ride wit us). so i tried to switch to itunes. it is the windows version of it, and maybe it is different on OSX, but the interface just doesnt make sense to me.

i was never a 'playlist' guy. I just opened up winamp with my collection by importing a folder into winamp and then playing what was avaliable. i could hit 'j' and 'oasis' and scroll up and down to get my fill of british altern-rock. keyboard shortcuts to stop, skip, fade and pause songs. everything makde sense. i even upgraded from 2.92 to 5.11 like a year ago (in fact, my favorite winamp plugin needed version 5.+) with no issues what so ever: they kept backward compatibility.

So, i start using itunes to organize my music collection (i start to realize that my music collections IDv2/IDv3 tags are horribly unorganized; the cd ripper software ive used over the years must not have done a very good job of using cddb.com. so i start organizing my collection, updating the idv3 tags through itunes (which is a horrendous pain: in winamp i can just alt+3 and edit every field directly (can't do multiple files though)). And I started visiting http://www.last.fm and http://www.amazon.com and downloading sample album art to be displayed with the mpeg4 .m4a converted tracks played on my ipod (or were selected in itunes). that was the coolest feature that i saw in itunes: being able to associate pictures with tracks and have them show up when played (i am easily amused).

so, do i give up winamp? i was still using it to play my muzak while writing code or taking a shower (love those logitech speakers). i didn't want to, but i started having to because i kept updating my music through itunes and porting my music into my ipod. well, then i discovered ml ipod a winamp plugin. it is pretty sweet, capable of doing almost everything that i was using itunes for, and glitch free. just downloaded it, installed it and fired up winamp and viola! my ipod shows up in the Devices listed in the Media Library (which is a new thing in Winamp 5+). now i can update all the songs on my ipod until my heart is content. HOWEVER! no more pretty pictures for me. :(

Currently, there is no way to associate a gif/jpg/png file with the music track to be uploaded to the ipod. which sucks, but it is a small price to pay to get back to my winamp roots. and supposedly, when the developer(s) figure(s) out a way to store consistent meta-data about tracks and also use (and/or update) the mp4.dll converter, then im sure that they will have pictures up and running on ipods very soon now. which makes me happi(er).


who said "it never rains in la"? they were wrong.

Comments

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