This is just a continuation of my thoughts on iTunes and even now my opinion on iTunes hasn’t changed much.
ID3 Tags
Well as my quest for organizing my music continues I keep bumping on the short comings of iTunes. Recently I found that some of my files were having incorrect Meta information (ID3 tags) in my iPod. So I opened iTunes to check them and I found that they were wrong even in iTunes. But I was pretty sure that I corrected the tags of these MP3 files using a MP3 Tag Editor. I checked the tags of the original file in my hard disk and it was having the correct data. Out of frustration I clicked the file in iTunes and it started to play and the tag got automatically changed. Then only I released that there was no refresh/update option in iTunes and when you edit the ID3 tags of the files outside of iTunes it will not get reflected until you play the file in iTunes. What a great optimization design!!
In order to make my iTunes happy I started editing the ID3 tags in iTunes itself and iTunes was happy to refresh it and were updated in my iPod too. Little did I know that it was not getting changed in the original file and it was just getting updated only in the iTunes library. And I was searching for an option to write the tag information to the file only to find that even this was not present.
So the lesson learnt: update the tag information of the files using some other tag editor outside of iTunes and then double click all those files in iTunes and play them so that the correct tag information gets updated both in the library and also in the file. How user friendly!
Podcast
I bumped again on the short comings of iTunes when I was trying to download some podcast.
No resume option for downloading podcast: Some of the podcasts that I have subscribed are more than 100 MB in size and when downloading, half way through the connection gets lost or iTunes freezes and the download process start again from scratch. Bandwidth is pretty scarce here and also costly and I end up wasting my precious bandwidth (and some bucks too).
No scheduling option for downloading podcast: if it’s available then I can schedule all my downloads from 2:00 am to 8:00 am every day when my ISP gives me free bandwidth. (Those who are having BSNL Broadband could feel the pain)
No way to subscribe to more than one podcast from a search result at iTunes Music store. You have to select only one at a time and have to perform the search again if you want to subscribe to more than one.
Giving reviews about podcast on iTunes: If I have to write a review about a particular podcast then I have to have an apple id and in order to have an apple id I need to have a credit card and I don’t have a credit card (yes seriously, believe me) and so no apple id and no reviews too.
In spite of all these short comings I am still using it, just for one thing – My little cute blackie 😉
Well, some things never change. I tried iTunes some time back, and, it had 100% CPU and about 100+ Memory Usage just for playing a single MP3 file! Well, I’m sticking with Windows Media Player 10 : Much smaller Memory Usage even with some 100+ songs in playlist. And, max CPU usage is about 6 or 7 percent.
And, BTW, I use FDM for Podcasts, but there’s this app called Juice. It’s quite nice. Try it…
Ya, even i was using FDM some time back (Before getting the ipod). But now the problem is that if i use FDM then i have to manually add the mp3 files to the library as songs and not as podcasts. And in the ipod these files will behave like normal mp3 files and not as podcast. Actually even that was also one of the crons of iTunes which i didn’t mention.
Check out http://yafll.com/articles/computers_and_internet/961.html