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I use iTunes for Windows to organize my music files.
It has a wonderful browser interface that sets up an intuitive genre-artist-album taxonomy out of that
huge mess of downloads I have scattered across my hard drives and network.
The track list lets me sort by duration, beats per minute, rating and
lots of other fields. The neat thing (to me) is that these fields are aspects of sound files that aren't exposed by the filesystem.
iTunes builds this metadata for you, and uses it to drive this wonderful user interface.
(side note: I could rant about how they really need to make better use of faceted metadata,
but I'll get around to punching this gift horse in the mouth in a sec.)
In contrast, when I look at my music files with windows explorer all I get is file size, creation date and a few
other one-size-fits-all fields for generic bits-on-a-disk.
So I've raved about how great this iTunes interface is compared to windows explorer, but check it.
When I go to import a folder of mp3s into iTunes, it gives me this shit:
First off, why the hell would I want to hit "New Folder" when I'm obviously (by way of menu selections) trying to import an existing folder?
That button is a completely useless distraction.
But that's not my primary gripe.
My "Add Folder to Library" use case goes something like this: download a bunch of albums to a music folder
on my hard drive. (These downloads go all night, I download several albums at a time, and I have hundreds of albums in that directory already.)
The next day when it comes time to tell iTunes about these new files, I have to go through this
sclerotic point and click dance:
- using windows explorer, sort folders by time of creation
- find the earliest folder corresponding to an album that isn't in iTunes
- for each folder after that, using iTunes:
- select File->Add Folder to Library
- select said folder in aforedepicted retardo folder finder window and hit "OK"
If only that "Add Folder" window looked more like the iTunes browser and track list.
I have to manually perform a task that's ideally suited to the iTunes interface. iTunes just won't let me use it that way.
Now I could interpret this choice of Folder Choosing Dialogs as Apple's subtle jab at windows' renowned piss-poor usability,
("oh you like our wonderful, pretty, lickable GUI? well here's the piece of crap file browser that windows gives you. now go buy a mac so you don't have to put up with this any longer")
but why explain with cattyness what could just as easily be explained with ignorance or laziness on the part of the developers?
Pointing out crap in the windows UI can be loads of fun, there really are much bigger fish in that barrel.
Maybe it's a known issue, but it just got pushed to the next release.
I still
have to wonder if they did that on purpose though. I mean, they go out of their way to make this nonstandard windows gui for the
main app window, but then leave a wart like "File->Import Folder" festering a mere click or two around the corner.
And why the hell am I spending so much time to bitch about this.
I mean, people are killing eachother for even dumber shit on the other side of the world right now.
For some reason this is the only gripe that came to mind. My life is pretty sweet.
Besides, I could just download each new batch of albums to a new folder every night and just point iTunes at that instead of picking off each folder individually. What kind of idiot- oh forget it.
But that folder dialog just really, really sucks.
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