@#$%@ iTunes
 

I'm pretty sure this belongs here.

I have a 160 gig iPod Classic that I use exclusively for travel. The iPod and my Bose QC15s can get me through the longest flight without breaking a sweat.

Recently, I upgraded to iTunes 11. I'll ignore for the moment the fact that it manged to make my DVD drives invisible -- after a little Googling, I find a fix for that. It involved a registry edit, which doesn't faze me at all, but could put off some people who don't like to tinker with the registry.

In addition to my entire CD collection, I also put CDs of music that I write on my iPod -- I may have mentioned that I write musicals in other threads. My current project is what is called "wall-to-wall," meaning that it's almost continuous music from curtain up to curtain down (some musicals are written this way). Previous versions of iTunes could recognize a "gapless" CD, i.e. one that doesn't have a 2-second pause between each track. Version 11, however, does not. Apparently, it consults its own catalog for this information and, if the CD is not there, it inserts pauses between tracks. Of course, my CDs, consisting of MY music, are not iTunes, so I get the gaps.

This is infuriating. I uninstalled iTunes 11 and, after some searching, found a copy of version 10 and installed that. Of course, that necessitated wiping out my music library as well as everything on the iPod. It took several hours to add my ripped CDs to the iTunes music library, and then another several hours to put them back on the iPod. I've just re-ripped the CD for my musical and I'm hoping that all will be well once it's re-synced to my iPod.

This, by the way, is the reason that I absolutely hate Apple, and why my iPod (for which there is no non-Apple alternative) is the only Apple product I will every own. Apple simply assumes that everyone either buys commercial CDs or buys tracks and albums from the Apple store. It never occurs to Apple that there may be perfectly legal home-burned CDs.

Never "upgrade" software on iJunk unless you absolutely have to. They love to "fix" what ain't broke.

http://www.amazon.com/Astell-Masteri...eywords=iriver

:)

Thanks but, unfortunately, 96 gig won't cut it for me. That's why I went with the iPod Classic.

iTunes is great if and only if you use it solely according to Apple's predetermined use cases. Otherwise it's badly written bloatware.

There are alternatives for managing iPods than iTunes, but I'm not sure if they will fix your problem.

Sorry, meant to link to the new one; dual 64GB slots + 32GB:

http://shop.iriverinc.com/index.php/...s-player.html/

But $1299 is a bit insane.

Are there no alternative ways to load music onto an iPod? I remember using other apps back in the day. Doesn't Doubletwist still do this?

Holy cow! If I could afford that, I'd just hire the musicians I like to come on board a private jet and entertain me. :) The specs of this thing are stunning, though. Even so, they don't match exactly what I master at (32 bit, 96k) as this brilliant little machine tops out at 24 bit, though it will handle up to 192k.

Doesn't mean I wouldn't really like one, though. :)

There are a few. I haven't tried them to see if they can handle gapless.

Trust me - OP's case is not the worst. At the least, OP can downgrade back to iTunes 10 as iTunes 10 still support the latest iPod Classic firmware.

My case is basically the "armageddon".

I used a factory unlocked iPhone 4S 64 GB from AT&T as iPod (from eBay). The phone feature is only used when I travel internationally. I used Google Nexus 5 in the U.S.

I have been resisting from iTunes 11 due to the elimination of the multiple-window feature. Since only iTunes 11 supports iOS 7, so I was kind of forced to upgrade the whole deal.

This is where my worst nightmare starts. I manual sync my content. I have been experienced multiple issues with syncing. In the end, synced content has been disappeared (mostly songs). Since I have to manage my own playlists (this is why I hate iTunes 11 without actually using it), so imagine how this is a PITA situation for me. Since my upgrade to iTunes 11 and iPhone 4S (from iPhone 4) from last September, I have restored the iPhone more than 10-20 times, including DFU restore.

The best part - every time, I almost had to restore on each iOS or iTunes upgrade.

Some of you may criticize maybe I bought a defective iPhone from eBay. I can assure you that's not the case.

And of course - I did experience the famous DVD issue as well.

I used Anapod Explorer, but it appears the software company no longer exists.

Here is a small list I found... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compari..._iPod_managers

iTunes is one of the most poorly designed bloatware applications ever. I wonder how much business it's cost Apple over the years. It's better now that it's not specifically required to get media...but it's still a huge pain if you want to move your own files to an iOS device.

I'll jump on the iTunes hate bandwagon.

Really, I cannot for the life of me understand how Apple developed such a bloated, bug ridden and downright obtuse piece of software. I don't have a Mac so I have no idea if the 'experience' is any better, but for this Windows 7 PC user, I have given up altogether with iTunes.

My 64G iPhone 5 is no longer used for music. I have a SanDisk Sansa Clip Zip with a 64Gb MicroSD with Rockbox firmware. It is so small it fits in my Sony noise cancelling headphone case. Best thing - plug it into a windows machine and I see two drives, one is the internal 4GB memory and the second is the 64G GB MicroSD. File management is totally up to me.....

Oh and video on my iPad Mini is accomplished with a 1TB Patriot Gauntlet Node connected via WiFi-N with VLC streaming directly from the Gauntlet with SMB. File management is as simple as dragging files across a USB-3 connected HDD from my Network connected PC.... There are alternatives for Apples' p1ss poor software.

Hate! Hate! Hate! I wanna Hate on iTunes, too!

I ditched it. I had an iPhone 3GS for two years - great product, except for iTunes - but my next phone was an Android. And the phone after that, too.

With an Android phone, I can load any music player I want, keep my music in almost any format I want, and all of the mainstream Android devices have MicroSD card slots. Android phones almost all have replaceable batteries (unfortunately, the tablets tend to not).

Choose wisely, PT. You can get an Android phone or small tablet to take the place of that old iPod. Heck you don't even need high capacity; just carry a few 64gb MicroSD cards in your wallet and swap when you want to listen to one thing or another. It's not like you'd be swapping cards every 5 or 10 tracks, and there's no way that you'll listen to all 160gb of music on a single flight, even on a long-haul, so swapping cards instead of pre-loading everything onto the onboard memory is not a deal-breaker.

And you still have a choice - you can either buy an Android phone to serve as a combined device, i.e. your phone and media player in one, or you can buy a second, separate, used Android phone that's no longer on a carrier, and use it just for music, the way you use your iPod.

And then you can kick @#$%@ iTunes to the curb.

With all due respect, this is the Apple attitude personified.

I don't listen to tracks, I listen to albums. I don't know what I want to listen to until I want to listen to it. That is exactly why I bought a device -- the only device -- that can store my entire music collection in a single, portable form. When I fly I . . . um . . . "self medicate" . . . with whatever the vodka the airline has chosen to make available, and keep myself in a nicely buzzed state while I listen to whatever music strikes my fancy at the moment. The last thing I want to do is shuffle tiny micro SD cards, trying to figure out what album is on what card, and THEN open up my phone, remove the battery, take out the card that's in there (careful not to remove the SIM card by mistake), insert the new card in the tiny slot, close everything up and then wait for my phone (I have a Droid Bionic) to boot up.

What is not a deal-breaker for you because of the way you listen to your music is absolutely a deal-breaker because of the way I listen to mine. Like Apple, you assume everyone listens to music the same way.

And now the good news . . .
 

I uninstalled iTunes 11, installed iTunes 10, and had to let it resync my iPod 3 times (no idea why it took 3 times), but it seems that now everything is okay. I haven't checked the iPod, but at least the iTunes music library plays my musical gapless. I didn't have to buy a bunch of micro SD card, or a $1,300 studio-quality player (which looks REALLY nice and I REALLY want, but can't afford). All it took was uninstalling iTunes 11 -- plus some registry edits, and searching for and removing some files Apple installed deep in the OS -- finding, virus scanning and installing iTunes 10, and 48 hours to re-scan my ripped CDs into the iTunes music library, re-download the album covers, and resync the iPod.

And people wonder why, when they tell me they have a Mac, I ask why they didn't get a real computer.

Not at all. I am also an album person and I don't listen to individual tracks, only whole albums.

Depending on the bit depth of your music, you can fit a lot of albums onto a 64gb card and a 32gb phone. Together they equal 96gb, minus a few gb for the OS and apps, giving you 2/3 of the storage of your 160gb iPod.

I never know what I'll be in the mood to listen to, either, but I load up my phone with 20 or 30 of my favorite albums and pick from them while I'm traveling. If I were doing a long-haul and would be traveling for 30 hours, I might run out of music toward the end of the trip and repeat, or if I had additional albums on a spare 64gb MicroSC card I might swap the card once during the trip.

This is only an issue for long-haul flights. On short-haul flights, you won't have to swap cards at all, because 20-30 hours of music will be more than enough to get you through a 2-6 hour flight with plenty of album variety and choice.

In time, MicroSD cards will be available in 128 or 256gb capacity and eliminate the need for swapping to equal your 160gb iPod. But even at 64gb, you only need 3 cards at the absolute max to equal the 160gb iPod, and only 2 if you count the internal storage of a 32gb or 64gb phone.

I understand not wanting to go through the 2-minute odyssey of swapping cards and rebooting while you're "in a nicely buzzed state", but you've got to come out of your stupor at some point during a long-haul, if only to eat without spilling your food all over your lap.

This isn't impossible, PT, it simply requires a little advance planning and the right equipment to get what you want - freedom from iTunes.

Most of my music is 192kb. The music that I write, arrange and record is in AAC, Apple's lossless codec, at 320kb.

And that's not enough -- right now, I have about 120gb of music stored.

And that's exactly what I DON'T want to do. I have enough to do when I'm getting ready to travel. The last thing I want to do is sit down at a computer, load up some micro SD cards, and decide ahead of time what I will feel like listening to.

And that's you. Your listening habits are very different from mine. That's my whole point.

It's on long-haul flights that I am most dependent on my iPod for entertainment.

Once again, the point is to have my complete music collection accessible, not to merely fill time with music.

Yes, with the key words being, "in time." There is also the expense -- a 128 gig SDXC card is nearly $100.

And, once again, having to shut down my phone, open the back, remove the battery, swap tiny cards that can be easily dropped and lost, re-insert the battery, close the black and then wait for the phone to boot up is far, far more trouble than simply using my iPod. And that ignores the inconvenience of not being able to scroll through my entire library to decide what I want to listen to.

No, I do not, nor do I want to.

AS I said, this IS the Apple philosophy personified, i.e. "We know better than you do how you should be using this gear/software."

I have an Android phone. And I'll tell you when I use it, rather than the iPod: when I travel to somewhere I will rent a car and have to drive for a couple of hours, I'll put an audio book on it. I use it with a Motorola Sportster speakerphone that can receive audio via Bluetooth and transmit it via FM to the car radio. For me (and those are the operative words), that is far more convenient than using an iPod FM transmitter, particularly because I'm also using the phone's GPS for navigation and both the audio and the spoken directions come through the car's radio.

Using the phone as my music player? No thanks. The compromises that entails -- disassembling the phone to swap microSD cards, using lower bit-rates for music, and not having my entire collection in one place and browsable -- makes it completely unacceptable. If it works for you, that's great. It wouldn't work for me. My goal isn't to "dump iTunes" but to have my music, my way when I travel.

AAC is a lossy codec, and it's not Apple's. It's part of the MPEG-4 standard that is a successor to the MPEG-3 standard.

If you want lossless, use FLAC. But iTunes doesn't support it, of course. And it will greatly increase the size of your music collection on disk. People I know who use it say they can hear a pronounced difference between lossy and lossless encoding.

Maybe it's not AAC -- I'd have to look. Apple describes it as lossless, though who knows with them.

Is RockBox still around? That worked well for me, and if for some reason you wanted to, you could view photos on your Classic too.

It won't work on the Classic, but, yes, it's still around.

Amazingly, nobody seems to be making HDD Android MP3 players. The last one appears to have been the Archos 7:

http://www.ebay.com/itm/Archos-7-160...item2336309ef8

Well, the iPod classic is an HDD player. I'm amazed that no one is making SSD players. An iPod Classic is around $250, street. I can buy an 160 gig SSD for around $100 street and on sale. How hard would it be to stick an SSD in an iPod Classic if the case were enlarged a bit?

Apparently, not that hard:

http://hackcorellation.blogspot.com/...onversion.html

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gldpulBPokY

http://www.head-fi.org/t/566780/offi...ssd-mod-thread

http://www.ifixit.com/Answers/View/5...ced+with+a+SSD

This is fantastic, thanks! I've got an old iPod 5th generation with a 60gig drive sitting around. This looks like a fun project. How nice it would be to have a 256gig drive inside!

Apparently, it's also possible to replace the OS on such devices as well, thus freeing you from @#$%@ iTunes at the same time.

I have a friend who's going through this exact dilemma right now, after the death of his beloved Creative MP3 player. He doesn't want to migrate to a phone-based solution for a few reasons, but he's having a heck of a time replacing it. And he won't go ipod, so he's sort of stuck.

I think iTunes is a superbly designed product. You just don't understand what it is designed for. You think it is a media management system. In reality it is trojan malware designed to make people think their Windows PC is broken and switch to a Mac ;)

If we're talking about listening on planes while drinking vodka, though, we really have to keep our perspective before insisting on 320kb AAC or FLAC. My biggest problem on a plane, Bose QC's or no, is dynamic contrast. Sure you can hear fortissimo just fine, bit pianissimo comes across as silence masked by engine drone. I'm pretty sure the last time I listened to Stravinsky on a plane - I thought the music had ended five minutes ago by the time it crashed back to life. Listening in the car isn't any better. I think high bitrate / lossless is great for sitting at home with a nice HiFi or a great set of earphones - but the devices in my travel arsenal are probably fine at 140kb.

I think you mean "dynamic range," not "dynamic contrast."

First of all, sample rate has nothing to do with dynamic range -- that is determined by bit depth which is completely unrelated. Next, the higher sample rate is going to give better clarity, particularly in the higher frequencies -- that is critical to listening in an environment with a lot of low-frequency rumble, like a plane. Finally, higher sample rates are essential for avoiding artifacts, resonances and harmonic distortition.

Sorry, but you're mistaken about the role of sample rate in musical reproduction.

I think fundamentally what I'm saying is that any nuanced difference will be undiscernible with all of the artificial noise in the environment.

Except that I have no trouble hearing the difference.

Ok - I believe you. I won't ask for the double-blind test.

You don't have to. As I mentioned at the start of the thread, I compose, record, mix and master my own music. I know it intimately, listening to it both with studio monitors and studio headphones. The master wave files are 96k, 32-bit. There is, of course, noticeable degradation when rendered to MP3 (less so when rendered to 44.1k, 16-bit for CD). The difference between mp3s at 192k and 128K is very noticeable, and between 192k and something lossless, or even Apple's lossy 328k codec is, similarly very noticeable.

Here's something interesting . . .
 

http://fiio.com.cn/UploadFiles/main/...0118161849.png

This is a Fiio X5 digital player.

http://www.fiio.com.cn/products/inde...nuID=105026016

This is a high-quality digital player that uses microSD cards for storage. Currently, it supports to 64g cards for a total storage of 128g. However, future firmware updates will permit use of 128g and 256g cards for a maximum amount of storage up to 512g.

The specs are pretty impressive, and it retails for only $350 (Amazon will have them in March).

I just bought a Fiio headphone amp for $129. It just came today and I haven't tried it yet, but it's solidly built, has gotten excellent reviews and also has very good specs. This is the amp that I got:

Fiio E12 Mont Blanc

http://fiio.com.cn/UploadFiles/main/...1106112558.jpg

http://www.fiio.com.cn/products/inde...nuID=105026001

I'm definitely keeping an eye on the Fiio X5.

Thing is, 128GB and 256GB MicroSD cards don't exist yet. SanDisk has a 128GB under development, but it isn't out yet. I have their headphone amp, and use it over USB2GO on my phone, works quite nicely.

As a scientist I get excited looking for an opportunity to construct an experiment, eliminate bias, and reach for the gold standard of a double blind test. Challenging your own beliefs is the best way to learn, IMO. I love being assigned to defend positions that rival my own views. Sounds like a fun weekend to me! I can see as a musician that suggestion was taken a different way. No offense was intended.

I forgot these were microsSD, rather than SD -- the latter is out in 128gb. Still, I doubt it will be that long.

I just tried out the headphone amp -- this is really nice. I had a Total Airhead amp that I used for years, but I couldn't find it since we move in December. This thing is a lot cleaner (and can go a lot louder). Teamed with the iPod, the sound is REALLY good.

None taken. I'm pretty much a left-brain kind of guy -- I'm far more interested in the result than how to arrive there.

For what it's worth, over on homerecording.com -- a forum for . . . well . . . home recording -- we have the bit-depth/sample rate debate all the time. The short version is this: the Nyquist rule requires a sample rate 2-1/2 times the highest frequency you want to reproduce. For 20 KHz, which is pretty much the highest frequency the human ear can hear (and only younger people can hear it), you need a sample rate of 50 KHz (and note that is 6 KHz higher than CDs, which are 44.1 KHz). Many on HR claim that a 48KHz sample rate is therefore sufficient. My view (totally unscientific, but it makes sense to me) is that audio processing (effects, mixes, etc.) at the Nyquist frequency can result in rounding errors:

2+2+2+2+2 = 10

2.1+2.3+2.2+2.1+2.3 = 11

This introduces digital artifacts. Also, music has harmonics that go well above audible frequencies. Though these harmonics can't be heard, phase differences result in cancellations which produce lower frequencies that can be heard. For this reason, I always record, mix and master at 96KHz sample rate, 32-bit depth. Professional studios use 192KHz and either 24- or 32-bit. My gear only supports up to 96KHz so that's what I use.

If you listen to music that was mastered from a direct track at 48KHz and 96KHz you won't hear any difference -- the Nyquist rule kicks in. However, if you track (record), do extensive editing, correction and effects, and mix at 48KHz, and then master at 48Khz, you'll definitely hear a difference when the entire process is done at the higher sample rate. Bit-depth primarily effects dynamic range but, because of the harmonics factor, I think you'll get a better sound with greater bit depth.

With all that said, MP3 (or any other lossy codec) adds another layer of complexity that, I think, can result in more rounding errors and other distortion. I don't know enough higher math to understand how Fast Fourier Transforms work, but I know they're a key component to audio compression.

The net result is, as I said, i.e. I can definitely hear the difference between an MP3 at 128K, at 192K and at Apple's lossy codec, which is variable bit rate 328K. Though Bose QC15s aren't the best headphones in the world, and I would never use them for mixing (I have studio phones for that, along with near-field monitors), they're not bad at all. When used with a good headphone amp, the noise-cancelling is sufficient to shut out virtually all outside noise and the resulting sound field is reasonably close to what you'd hear at home. At this point, the weakest point in the link is the iPod itself, which has okay, but not superlative, DACs. That's why I'm real interested in the Fiio X5. Its specs are extraordinary -- for all intents and purposes completely flat from 20-20Khz, THD comparable to home audiophile components. It handles most compressed codecs, as well as non-lossy formats. Once the higher capacity microSD cards are available, 512 Gb should be enough to skip compression altogether. At that point, the combination of the X5 and E12 headphone amplifier should be magnificent. :)

Mediamonkey is a great alternative to iTunes. I use it for my two iPods and Galaxy S4.

I'll give it a try. Thanks!

Be sure to read the online help on how to use it to manage your iPod because it's not very intuitive the first few times.

Given that the interface is almost exactly the same as iTunes 10, I agree -- it's not in the least intuitive. :) I was able to do enough with it to determine that it will meet my needs very well AND that it's not saddled with the ridiculous DRM nonsense of iTunes that insists on using only a single "registered" iPod with a single music library, which made maintaining the iPod on the road with my laptop virtually impossible. I bought the purchased edition.

Thanks again for the recommendation. iTunes is now officially banished from all my computers. :)