Call Me Al

I generally reserve this blog for Mozilla related stuff. 20 days ago I wrote about having an XUL application to manage my music collection and several people recommended iTunes.

On a scale of 1 to 5, I'd give iTunes a 4. It has a great interface for mass-manipulating ID3 tags. Who knew that I had 3 different ways of spelling Pat Benatar. I had already resolved the naming issues for the file names themselves, but I hadn't validated the metadata. 6 years ago I was using a program written in Visual Foxpro to organize and change. It was a bit slow and not feature-filled, but at the time of Napster, it did the job.

As with all applications, it has room for improvement. It uses the same widget set as Quicktime, which has never reacted smoothly on any of my machines. This leads to a non-native look and feel, since I'm not on a Mac. Ooo, cross platform XUL-ness! Ahem. I like the Browser that breaks things down into artist, genre, and album. Of course it appears that half of my genre tags are wrong. Not to mention when things seem to need multiples. I don't think even ID3v2 takes care of that.

I have two memory resident applications, iPodService.exe and iTunesHelper.exe. I don't have an iPod. The closest I come to portable music is a discman that can play cds full of mp3s. I never use that since I'm always around a computer. Yes, I do know how to prevent them from starting. My question is: what are they and why are they launching? iTunes has the ability to track your recent and frequently played music. There seems to be some criteria that determines whether or not a file actually makes it in there. Do I have to listen to it from start to end?

iTunes wants to be your default music player. Of course that means giving up the features of Winamp that I enjoy so much, like having controls in my system tray (gentray plugin). It comes with a cross-fader, but not much else in terms of audio manipulation. iTunes is geared much more towards picking a playlist and saying Go. Even if you tell it to not be your default player, when you tell it to play music, it uses its internal player instead of your designated one.

Mass editing tags is easy. Editing individual tags without launching the whole editor isn't. Double clicking a track starts it playing. Click, pause, click, makes a field editable. Several times I didn't pause long enough, so my previous song was interrupted. You can't click once and hit F2 for rename. I think the only field that double-click should make it play for is the title. You can't right click a field and choose rename, either.