Alternative to iTunes

[tommy p]

I got my first Apple computer a few months ago and don't like iTunes much.  It's a pain in the ass to burn CDs (and yes, I still do that), and when I imported my old music library it created multiple files of a lot of songs.  It also doesn't pick up artwork very well IMO.

Anybody have a suggestion for a user-friendly, better working alternative?

[shankyboy]

I have been a die hard Mac user for the past 20 years and iTunes becomes more frustrating to use with every update. There was a time when managing files and burning to disc were simple tasks. I think the complexity is due to iTunes being more than just a Music management system these days and that burning to disc is no longer a common practice. That being said, I doubt that there are any other music management apps out there that will do a better job. Even Neil Young's Pono Player has fallen by the wayside. I think you are stuck with iTunes. 

[HAMERMAN]

Part of me wonders if Apple doesn't make those functions you mention harder on purpose to help steer people towards the path of least resistance,  buying the songs on iTunes - which makes Apple more money. :-)

[kizanski]

1 minute ago, HAMERMAN said:

Part of me wonders if Apple doesn't make those functions you mention harder on purpose to help steer people towards the path of least resistance,  buying the songs on iTunes - which makes Apple more money. 🙂

Part of you wonders???

Of COURSE that's what they're doing.  That's what they do.

[bubs_42]

I loved my Ipod, I could take all my music anywhere and it was always with me. Then one day I was getting my morning coffee and left it on the table at work and when I came back it was gone. At the time I was listening to Johnny Lang's Turn Around album, pretty much non stop, so a few evenings after my Ipod was MIA I grabbed the CD and put it in the car stereo. FLOORED ME ON HOW MUCH I WAS MISSING! Lets face it, they quality of what you hear from a file on an Ipod to the actual disc IMHO not even in the same league. I've never gone back and I haven't bought anything of "MY" Music from Itunes. 

[kizanski]

13 minutes ago, bubs_42 said:

...I grabbed the CD and put it in the car stereo. FLOORED ME ON HOW MUCH I WAS MISSING! Lets face it, they quality of what you hear from a file on an Ipod to the actual disc IMHO not even in the same league.

That could have been due to the rip quality when the songs were imported to the iPod.

[bubs_42]

21 minutes ago, kizanski said:

That could have been due to the rip quality when the songs were imported to the iPod.

Everything is possible, but at this point i've went back to buying CD's. LOL 

[kizanski]

16 minutes ago, bubs_42 said:

Everything is possible, but at this point i've went back to buying CD's. LOL 

Soon you'll be one of those vinyl freaks.

[tommy p]

1 hour ago, bubs_42 said:

I loved my Ipod, I could take all my music anywhere and it was always with me. Then one day I was getting my morning coffee and left it on the table at work and when I came back it was gone. At the time I was listening to Johnny Lang's Turn Around album, pretty much non stop, so a few evenings after my Ipod was MIA I grabbed the CD and put it in the car stereo. FLOORED ME ON HOW MUCH I WAS MISSING! Lets face it, they quality of what you hear from a file on an Ipod to the actual disc IMHO not even in the same league. I've never gone back and I haven't bought anything of "MY" Music from Itunes. 

I've never owned an iPod for this very reason.  Whether I heard compressed music files played on ear buds, through a PA, on a car stereo, or computer, they all sounded like crap.  My wife gave me an old iPod of hers 3-4 years ago and it's still sitting in a drawer untouched.

 

47 minutes ago, kizanski said:

That could have been due to the rip quality when the songs were imported to the iPod.

I was thinking the same thing.  I've posted about this before, but I know my next vehicle will NOT have a CD player and I have about 2,000 now and still buy new ones regularly.  Hence my question about a good music player/management system for Macs.  I have a 2Tb external hd that I want to put as much of my music on as I can in a lossless format, and I plan to get a good size jump drive (128 or 256Gb) to use in whatever new car I get.  I started to do this with iTunes and it was ridiculously slow.  Also, somewhere I read that iTunes won't read your library from an external drive so I stopped doing it at about 10-12 CDs.  Anybody know if that's true or not?

[BubbaVO]

20 minutes ago, bubs_42 said:

Everything is possible, but at this point i've went back to buying CD's. LOL 

I much prefer the full CD sound.  Since the best stereo system I own is in the car, I'll carry cases around.  But the CDs sound good even through my monoprice "tube" amp and my craigslist sourced Mission speakers.    

I agree that the rip quality will make a difference, but then the storage of all that data becomes an issue.  And now that my Seagate backup drive (1.5T) just $hat the bed, I have to go through the lovely process of converting my  CDs back to a more iPhone friendly format.  1st world problem.

[mathman]

4 minutes ago, tommy p said:

I've never owned an iPod for this very reason.  Whether I heard compressed music files played on ear buds, through a PA, on a car stereo, or computer, they all sounded like crap.  My wife gave me an old iPod of hers 3-4 years ago and it's still sitting in a drawer untouched.

 

I was thinking the same thing.  I've posted about this before, but I know my next vehicle will NOT have a CD player and I have about 2,000 now and still buy new ones regularly.  Hence my question about a good music player/management system for Macs.  I have a 2Tb external hd that I want to put as much of my music on as I can in a lossless format, and I plan to get a good size jump drive (128 or 256Gb) to use in whatever new car I get.  I started to do this with iTunes and it was ridiculously slow.  Also, somewhere I read that iTunes won't read your library from an external drive so I stopped doing it at about 10-12 CDs.  Anybody know if that's true or not?

iTunes will read from an external drive.  That's what  I use all the time.  Another option to burning CD's is to get Roxio Toast Titanium.  You can burn the songs from the iTunes library easily with Toast.  I have a 80gb iPod classic that I love.  I ripped all my cd's as aiff files and the sound quality is quite good.

[shankyboy]

I never stopped buying CDs. It's a disease. I have over 2,000 of them. The only time I download something from iTunes is if I can't find it on CD anywhere so I do have a couple hundred releases downloaded from iTunes. Fortunately for us Austinites, we have Waterloo Records which is one of the finest record stores ever. I wonder how long they can hold out given that most of the really cool music stores have closed their doors. My 120gb iPod bit the dust awhile back but now that I have a 256gb iPhone, I can carry all of my music with me and listen to it anytime I want. I do lament the days of vinyl and CDs but thoroughly enjoy the portability and convenience of listening to music in electronic format.

[shankyboy]

10 minutes ago, tommy p said:

Also, somewhere I read that iTunes won't read your library from an external drive so I stopped doing it at about 10-12 CDs.  Anybody know if that's true or not?

I have a 256gb thumb drive in my F-150 and have no issues listening to the music on it. The Ford Sync system does a pretty good job in that department.

[Bloozguy]

I'm just a poor old guy with around 3,000 CDs and 1,000 LPs...

I use iTunes but everything other than one (1) song has been ripped from CD not purchased from iTunes or otherwise downloaded. I use the Apple Lossless format and the burned CDs sound good - to my ears indistinguishable from conventional CDs. I also have the entire iTunes library stored on an external drive.

Putting them on my iPod (160 GB Classic) is another story altogether. The compression required to fit them all on the iPod just turns them into audio rubbish. Fine if you're using earbuds, but even in the car they just sound miserable compared to the CD.

All I want now is a 2 TB iPod or similar player and I'm set...

 

[specialk]

21 hours ago, tommy p said:

It's a pain in the ass to burn CDs

Right-click on the playlist and choose Burn Playlist To Disc.

iTunes is bloated. I miss 10.7.🙁

[gorch]

I’m a happy Amazon Music user for years. They offer players for almost any popular platform. However, the individual subscription is not available anymore. It needs Prime today I think. 

Burning CDs only makes sense if the source is of the same quality. Otherwise you burn crap to spin. Which doesn’t really make sense. I seriously don’t know of any service that offers full scale data for download right now. It’s all limited quality.

[scottcald]

23 hours ago, HAMERMAN said:

Part of me wonders if Apple doesn't make those functions you mention harder on purpose to help steer people towards the path of least resistance,  buying the songs on iTunes - which makes Apple more money. 🙂

Part of it is that, sure, but the other part of it is that many people just use Spotify or Pandora and don't even own music anymore.  Apple's never been about hanging on to something feel they don't need.  

It's still not that hard to burn a disc:

Insert blank disc

In the dialog that comes up, choose Open iTunes.

Select the playlist you want to burn

Go to File > Burn Playlist to Disc

That said, I'm not aware of a good alternative to manage the music AND do the burning.  Toast is the defacto big gun of the disc burning software.  I'm unaware of any free alternatives that I've heard anyone say good things about. 

 

[tommy p]

6 hours ago, specialk said:

Right-click on the playlist and choose Burn Playlist To Disc.

iTunes is bloated. I miss 10.7.🙁

 

2 hours ago, scottcald said:

Part of it is that, sure, but the other part of it is that many people just use Spotify or Pandora and don't even own music anymore.  Apple's never been about hanging on to something feel they don't need.  

It's still not that hard to burn a disc:

Insert blank disc

In the dialog that comes up, choose Open iTunes.

Select the playlist you want to burn

Go to File > Burn Playlist to Disc

That said, I'm not aware of a good alternative to manage the music AND do the burning.  Toast is the defacto big gun of the disc burning software.  I'm unaware of any free alternatives that I've heard anyone say good things about. 

 

I know how to do it - it's just a pain in the ass.  I don't have or use playlists.

If I want to make a copy of a disk that I don't already have in iTunes, I have to rip the disk, create a playlist of the disk, then burn the playlist to a new disk, then delete it (because as stated before I don't use playlists, and why would I want a "playlist" of every group of songs that is already an album anyway?), and each step takes a LOT longer than my old XP machine did with Roxio.  There's no simple "copy disk" feature which would be insert disk to copy, hit copy, insert blank disk.  Also, after the fact I found that iTunes was inserting gaps between songs that run together on the original album so that's something else to deal with that you don't have to do with a "copy disk" command.

I'll have to revisit the external HD problem.  When iTunes asked me if I wanted it to import my old music library and I said yes, it put it on my Mac HD automatically.  If I could just move the whole thing to an external HD and clear the space on my internal, that would be ideal and I wouldn't have to start over but I've noticed whenever I try to put something from my Mac on an external storage device, a metric shit-ton of extra files are created for some reason.  From online research and asking around, it seems like the best idea is to get an app specifically for disk burning, and another media player like VLC and delete the entire iTunes library.

I'm just disappointed that after all these years of hearing how magical the Apple OS is and all their apps are, I'm finding it to be cumbersome and not user friendly at all.  I didn't mention that Bluetooth stops working on it nearly daily and I either have to wait 20-30 minutes for it to magically start working again, reboot, or attach a wired keyboard and mouse.  This can happen at the login screen OR (even more maddeningly) I can log in fine and then 30 seconds later everything stops working.  I've contacted their support on this several times and they are worthless.  Google Mac Bluetooth problems and you will find thousands of people with the same problem and no solution that makes it work and stay working.

[scottcald]

3 minutes ago, tommy p said:

know how to do it - it's just a pain in the ass.  I don't have or use playlists.

If I want to make a copy of a disk that I don't already have in iTunes, I have to rip the disk, create a playlist of the disk, then burn the playlist to a new disk, then delete it (because as stated before I don't use playlists, and why would I want a "playlist" of every group of songs that is already an album anyway?), and each step takes a LOT longer than my old XP machine did with Roxio.  There's no simple "copy disk" feature which would be insert disk to copy, hit copy, insert blank disk.  Also, after the fact I found that iTunes was inserting gaps between songs that run together on the original album so that's something else to deal with that you don't have to do with a "copy disk" command.

Haven't looked at the gap thing, just haven't used the CD burn in ages, but the copy thing isn't Apple's doing.  It's something record companies required to let their music on iTunes years ago.  Roxio makes Toast for the Mac, so you could get that. 

There were issues with some of the first silver bluetooth keyboards and the mice when they switched over to that model, but I haven't had issues with any of them in made in the last few years.  

The iTunes location is the default one it imports to.  Copy the iTunes folder to an external drive, then hold the option key when starting iTunes, and it'll ask you to locate the Library you want to use, then just point it to the external.  Once you look through and make sure all is correct on the external, you can delete the one from the internal drive.  

Hope that's helpful. 

 

[specialk]

2 hours ago, scottcald said:

why would I want a "playlist" of every group of songs that is already an album anyway?

Smart Playlists are the way to go:

https://support.apple.com/kb/PH19487?locale=en_US

[Toadroller]

On 5/3/2018 at 7:12 AM, gorch said:

Burning CDs only makes sense if the source is of the same quality. Otherwise you burn crap to spin. Which doesn’t really make sense. I seriously don’t know of any service that offers full scale data for download right now. It’s all limited quality.

http://tidal.com/us

Which streams lossless and extended bit rates.  More details here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tidal_(service)  I'm not a subscriber; have never even tried it.  Just an FYI

Music is interesting. 

I've been a hi fi nut since I was 12, and have a decent setup for serious listening, which, to be honest,  I do for 45 minutes every six months, get excited, start playing with speaker placement, thinking about new preamps, cables, tweaking the record player... and then life gets in the way.  My car has a 32gb iPod in the glove compartment hooked up to the stereo through OEM connections, which lets me shuffle or play any artist or album I want.  A quarter of the time, I just play from that device; all my music.  Another quarter is something new, streamed in from my phone via bluetooth, usually Amazon Prime music, which lets me explore some new music. Most of the time, though, I'm listening to nothing, enjoying the silence in a long drive.  Just thinking away.

That's how I know I'm getting older.  You kids turn that down!

[scottcald]

36 minutes ago, Toadroller said:

That's how I know I'm getting older.  You kids turn that down!

And get off the lawn!  (shaking fist) 

[JohnnyB]

On 5/2/2018 at 7:51 AM, kizanski said:

Soon you'll be one of those vinyl freaks.

And you can take it with you just like iTunes or streaming to your smart phone:

 

[mathman]

There is a preference setting for copying the songs to your itunes library.  You want it to do that so all the songs are in one place. 

I keep my itunes library on an external drive along with my photos and iphoto albums.  Replace it at most every two years and just copy every thing to the new one and hold on to the old as a backup copy.