iTunes & me
I have this love-hate relationship with iTunes.
I love the convenience of buying actual legal licenses for my content from the iTunes store.
I hate everything else about it.
It seems almost like it was designed to be exactly what I didn’t want in a content management system. It’s not very good at finding missing content when the underlying structure of the disk changes (and in my life, it does, often), it’s slow..
I enjoyed kplaylist, but my needs have gone far beyond it. I think I really am going to have to write something.
March 10th, 2007 at 5:55 pm
Not exactly on topic.. but if you have time check out:
Democracy TV:
http://www.getdemocracy.com/
and SongBird
http://www.songbirdnest.com/
November 2nd, 2007 at 10:21 am
I wrote something. It’s incredibly clunky, but it fits ME perfectlly. I want to be able to affect playlists with an echo statement at the command line….
echo 05_:–changer >>attrib.lst
^ remove track from “changer.m3u” (after next re-index of course)
it’s regex:attribute pairs, with a meta-file that lets you build sets by adding and subtracting existing attributes(tags).
like: changerrecent:+changer,–hated,+nextconcert,–changerOlderThan6Months
Then I adapted it to handle the tags for my photo-uploading. Gotta re-use that spaghetti (~4000 lines) code!
disadvantages:
* indexing takes 20 minutes. but i fold it into bedtime.bat.
* you have to open attrib.lst in the same folder as the mp3 that is playing. i wrote a BAT file that did this by extracting the id3 tag from the audioscrobbler logfile. So obviously I have to use winamp+audioscrobbler, but that’s okay, i do. i log all my tracks online for 5+ yrs now. so i wrote a 2-letter command that does this, and usually works. (if only winamp would just give you the damn path, this would be easier!)
* it’s in perl (actually, i think that’s an advantage, but many probably don’t)
advantages:
* renaming files has no affect on playlists. they’ll drop out until the next index, but be back in with the new name. that was my major requirement to start with
* can easily play with sets of playlists … we mark songs as ‘learned’ when we laern them, and with some meta-set playing, there is “Carolyn learned but not clint” and “Clint learned but not Carolyn”, and when one of us is gone, we can focus on the songs that we need to focus on to “catch up” to the other.
* portable. copy a folder to another computer? attrib.lst is still there, still describing it. I could edit it over the network. No database connectivity or client required. “Echo” is all that’s really needed to add information, and a text editor to remove.
* MANY playlists generated — hundreds i’ve never used even once, like one for each id3v1 and id3v2 genre
I hate managed solutions. They are never specific to my precise needs. I usually DIY when I can, i just hate that it takes time. I would always prefer to download a program than to write anything. . . but music is too important!