Its also odd to me that while ipod is hands down the easiest device to use once the music is on there, iTunes is very cumbersome and often counterintuitive. perhaps its better for Maccies?
iPod is just a portable iTunes.
I'm definitely not a "Maccy" and Apple as a company annoys me to a large extent (they have a habit of designing great things just to break them or ignore flaws for marketing reasons), but to call iTunes "cumbersome and often counterintuitive" is rather inaccurate. iTunes is a different take on a music jukebox program....It's emphesis is on the "jukebox" rather than the "music". Anyone can play a music file...the key is to organize them efficiently.
The music player pedigree on the PC side, from a UI perspective, is just sad. You basically have all of these apps that copied their user interface from Sound Recorder, an application that's barely a glorified tech-demo. As a result everyone decided buttons should be the size of bacteria and they added on dozens of extra widgets and windows that were slapped onto this Sound Recorder-like window like a three your old playing with Duplo. Just to top things off, they added skins, just in case anyone ever wanted a consistant interface.
Apple is not completely exempt from this, since their Quicktime player is a temple to poor UI design and visual bit-rot. The Quicktime preferences window hasn't changed in 10 years, which wouldn't be a problem if the thing made the slightest bit of sense.
Now, iTunes can be counterintuitive to use if you've been been traied to use music players that seem to have been designed by cavemen. Remember, most music players were either designed before people had massive music collections or ripped off their design from a player that was.
First of all, no one should ever have to manage the place on their disk where music is stored. The
file should
know what it is, you shouldn't have to name it, you shouldn't have to move it, you shouldn't have to organize it. The file name of a song should not matter in the slightest, because it's the tags that matter. We now have a generation of anal retentives who have become accustom to spending hours organizing their music collections
just right, leaving the world with a mish mash of thousands of different systems to organize music. I once talked with someone who refused to use iTunes because the artist listing is on the left and the album listing is on the right...That's a called a disease, folks.
Second, hierarchies suck. The whole point of iTunes is that it's a database dressed up like a music player. It can afford to be a flat listing of all of your music because searching is hillariously fast. Also, if it bothers you just having one library, make a playlist and browse that. Yes, you can use the browse function for just about everything.
Third, smart playlists are your friend. I can't emphesize this enough. You can work magic with those things.
Fourth, like I said,
Apple has a site where they explain the whole thing. There's movies and everything.
A considerable part of the animosity people express about iTunes, espcially the Windows version, is Apple's fault. They expect people to use iTunes because of the iPod. They need to start trying to pushing iTunes as an application rather than as an appendage to the iPod. They also need to jumpstart development of iTunes for Windows plugins and addons. They very, very quietly released an SDK last year and then absolutely did nothing to promote it. iTunes, from a features perspective, should be almost as extensible as Winamp but there's no one out there making plugins.
