0601.21
19:45:07
iTunes
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So I’ve spent the last several hours re-ripping my CD collection. iTunes support for FLAC, my digital music format of choice, is nil, and the few Macintosh programs that support for the free lossless audio codec have iPod integration that is specious at best. Fortunately for myself, this newer lossy codec of apple’s, AAC, doesn’t sound as pathetic as the few old (late 90s) mp3s I still have laying around in various folders.
Anyhow, aside from no FLAC support, iTunes also has some other areas where it leaves plenty to be desired. For some unknown reason Apple made the decision to have CD lookup done through Gracenote’s CDDB, as opposed to the more compreshensive (and often more reliable) FreeDB. CDDB, in my mind, primarily conjures thoughts of wholly-differently formatted track information for the two CDs in the same box set. Here, five years after I last used a ripping program that interfaces with it, it does the same thing. Of course, it’s often that neirther one of them are really correct.
For example, For Outkast’s most recent double-album “Speakerboxxx / The Love Below” tracks on the Speakerboxxx (Disc 1) have artist attributes set to “Big Boi” (one of the two rappers comprising Outkast) unless, say, an outside rapper is featured in a verse, and then the artist attribute is “Big Boi feat. whomever”, in typical rap credit fashion. However, tracks where both Big Boi and Andre 3000 are clearly present on a track, the artist is merely listed as Big Boi. However, on The Love Below (Disc 2), The artist attribute is merely “Outkast” regarless of any collabration on the track. This means going through the CD liner notes and hand-editing all this metadata, which is basically the same thing one would have to do if they didn’t have any access to a CD metadata DB.
When I set the thing on shuffle after importing my first few CDs, I noticed iTunes doing something that brought me back to those heady days of Winamp 2.2 — cross-fading the end of one song into the beginning of the other. Not only does this make for some hillarious (and sometimes rather fitting) segues that’s to the fairly eclectic nature of my music collection, it ignores the fact that not all songs, you know, have a three-second outro for the radio station DJ to fade. This is an easily-disabled setting in the iTunes preferences, although it once again is another part of iTunes that, to me, smacks of the Napster era.
What is kind of cool are these “smart playlists” that allow you to collate songs by their metadata. This is hobbled, of course, by the fact that the aforementioned Gracenote CDDB metadata sucks. Half of the music from 2002’s Early Days & Latter Days: The Best of Led Zepplin Volumes 1 & 2 is listed with the date when the song was recorded (late ’60s and early ’70s), and the other half with a year metadatum of “2000.” 2000! What the heck? Okay, admittedly, this album came out in 2000, but this CD edition is from 2002 — but still, it might be the “Latter Days” of Led Zepplin, but it’s not that late.
Finally, eventhough iTunes and the iPod support album art, iTunes makes no effort to look up any art. Fortunately, Amazon has plenty where that’s concerned, but this is just one more far-from-automated step in what would otherwise be considered a fairly idiot-friendly program.
This software merits the rank:
On a side note, I noticed on one of the CDs a little blurb that finally explained the RIAA’s position against filesharing in a manner that isn’t totally bogus. Normally it’s some sort of big FBI seal, you know, and whining about how they’ve made it a felony and blah blah. This one’s actually sort of reasonable:
Anyhow, aside from no FLAC support, iTunes also has some other areas where it leaves plenty to be desired. For some unknown reason Apple made the decision to have CD lookup done through Gracenote’s CDDB, as opposed to the more compreshensive (and often more reliable) FreeDB. CDDB, in my mind, primarily conjures thoughts of wholly-differently formatted track information for the two CDs in the same box set. Here, five years after I last used a ripping program that interfaces with it, it does the same thing. Of course, it’s often that neirther one of them are really correct.
For example, For Outkast’s most recent double-album “Speakerboxxx / The Love Below” tracks on the Speakerboxxx (Disc 1) have artist attributes set to “Big Boi” (one of the two rappers comprising Outkast) unless, say, an outside rapper is featured in a verse, and then the artist attribute is “Big Boi feat. whomever”, in typical rap credit fashion. However, tracks where both Big Boi and Andre 3000 are clearly present on a track, the artist is merely listed as Big Boi. However, on The Love Below (Disc 2), The artist attribute is merely “Outkast” regarless of any collabration on the track. This means going through the CD liner notes and hand-editing all this metadata, which is basically the same thing one would have to do if they didn’t have any access to a CD metadata DB.
When I set the thing on shuffle after importing my first few CDs, I noticed iTunes doing something that brought me back to those heady days of Winamp 2.2 — cross-fading the end of one song into the beginning of the other. Not only does this make for some hillarious (and sometimes rather fitting) segues that’s to the fairly eclectic nature of my music collection, it ignores the fact that not all songs, you know, have a three-second outro for the radio station DJ to fade. This is an easily-disabled setting in the iTunes preferences, although it once again is another part of iTunes that, to me, smacks of the Napster era.
What is kind of cool are these “smart playlists” that allow you to collate songs by their metadata. This is hobbled, of course, by the fact that the aforementioned Gracenote CDDB metadata sucks. Half of the music from 2002’s Early Days & Latter Days: The Best of Led Zepplin Volumes 1 & 2 is listed with the date when the song was recorded (late ’60s and early ’70s), and the other half with a year metadatum of “2000.” 2000! What the heck? Okay, admittedly, this album came out in 2000, but this CD edition is from 2002 — but still, it might be the “Latter Days” of Led Zepplin, but it’s not that late.
Finally, eventhough iTunes and the iPod support album art, iTunes makes no effort to look up any art. Fortunately, Amazon has plenty where that’s concerned, but this is just one more far-from-automated step in what would otherwise be considered a fairly idiot-friendly program.
This software merits the rank:
GOOD (+2)
On the Lamb Metered Rating Scale (LMRS).On a side note, I noticed on one of the CDs a little blurb that finally explained the RIAA’s position against filesharing in a manner that isn’t totally bogus. Normally it’s some sort of big FBI seal, you know, and whining about how they’ve made it a felony and blah blah. This one’s actually sort of reasonable:
This recording and artwork are protected by copyright law. Using Internet services to distribute copyrighted music, giving away illegal copies of discs or lending discs to others for them to copy is illegal and does not support those involved in making this piece of music — especially the artist.The irony, however, is that this is printed in the jacket of a Rat Pack CD — Sinatra, Sammy, and Dean Martin are all long dead.
2 Comments
GMT-0500 09:29:17 0601.22 (Sun)
But do you want their children and the beneficiaries of their estates to starve?! They’re probably JUST hanging on, in a homeless shelter somewhere, and when they get that royalty check for $5.67 each month all they can do is spend it on a cheeseburger. I hope now you realize the evil of filesharing.
GMT-0500 20:50:21 0601.22 (Sun)
You do have to admit that for someone far less techno savvy as yourself, itunes offers a pretty good way at importing and storing music. Plus it interfaces very well with the iPod and it is easy to transfer music onto the iPod.