If you drag a folder of songs that happens to have a playlist file (.m3u) to iTunes it imports all the songs twice! Not just in your library twice, but actually makes two copies of the file on your hard drive. This has to be a bug, because no one would be stupid enough to think this was a useful feature.
And to add insult to injury, the “show duplicate tracks” feature is completely infuriating. First, it counts any two or more tracks with the same name whether or not any of the other information matches. So every live track, cover, demo, etc., shows up as a dupe. Second, it shows you all the duplicate tracks and places them next to each other. You have to manually command-click every other track and then delete them—which can be quite tedious if you’ve just imported ten albums that happened to have playlist files. How hard would it be to have a feature that deletes every truly duplicate track for you (by matching them bit-for-bit at least, or with intelligent digital signatures at best) with one command?
I have to say, I think that iTunes is probably one the worst designed Apple apps, at least as far as being useful to people who aren’t complete beginners. I agree that simplicity should be a number one priority, and sometimes you have to leave features out to accomplish that, but iTunes has some major design flaws. When I was a Windows user (oh so long ago) I used Winamp (probably the only Windows program I really miss—and which has no equivalent on OSX (and no—VLC is not even close)), and I organized all my music files in folders on my hard drive. If I wanted to hear an album, I’d right click the folder it was in and select “Add folder to my Winamp Queue.” Then when the current album finished the next would start playing automatically. I didn’t need to create specific, named, playlists automatically (since I almost never listen to an identical series of albums or tracks more than once).
Try this with iTunes: Select an album through the browser and start playing it. When you’re halfway through the album and you decide what album you want to hear next, add it to the end of the queue, so that it will start playing immediately when the current album is finished. Opps, there’s no way to do that.
iTunes tries to force you to create always create playlists. There is no current playlist/buffer. You could create a playlist that functions as such, but then you’d be constantly getting rid of tracks you’ve already played.
You can try to do this with the party shuffle, but it’s really a completely different (although useful) feature, and doesn’t quite work. Even if you drag the remainder of the current album to the party shuffle, and then drag the next album there, and delete all the random crap that party shuffle puts in, it won’t actually start playing the party shuffle list until you double click on one of the tracks in the part shuffle playlist. And so if you want the transition to happen without interruption (to simply avoid restarting the current song and repositioning the track cursor), you must wait until you’re in between songs. This is all way to much work for something I should be able to do with only a few key presses and minimal thought.
I guess I could get used to always playing tracks from party shuffle, but I really don’t want the random feature at all, so this doesn’t really work for me. Maybe the problem is that I actually listen to albums still, instead of what ever top 10 single shows up on iTMS this week.
So this all may seem inconsequential, but when I want to do something very simple and natural, and my software acts like it knows better than me, I get really frustrated. Isn’t that supposed to be the domain of Microsoft’s software, not Apple’s?
Schoschie Says:
November 22nd, 2005 at 5:34 pm
Ditto. Importing the .m3u files is stupid, and the find duplicates feature is completely useless. Like you, I’ve been looking for a way to properly find MP3 duplicates. One cannot rely on ID3 info because it’s likely for people to have two songs that are identical with respect to their ID3 tags, but differ in audio data. This is especially true for people like me who try to keep their songs properly ID3-tagged. So, indeed, the most thorough method is to look at the actual MP3 audio data.
I did not find any piece of software that was capable of such comparison, so I decided to write my own. I managed to get a small C program running that – so far – will recognize the mpeg frames and assiocated metadata (frame size, bit rate, etc.) in an mp3 file. A bitwise comparison would be the next step, but usually it would suffice to check if the frame headers in two mp3 files are different.
I stopped development because I had other things to do. Your post might inspire me to resume coding :)
chris Says:
November 22nd, 2005 at 5:37 pm
That’d be a valuable utility. Especially if you could run it on your whole iTunes library in one step. Let me know if you need a beta tester!