It's always the BIG ones!
I've been collecting MP3s since before most people had heard of them, when dial-up was the prevalent Internet connection type and finding MP3s meant digging through FTP sites for individual songs. Napster wasn't even a dangerous idea yet, and finding a complete CD in one location was a pipe dream. I've got a pretty big collection, that's the point I'm trying to make here.
I've had an iPod for about a year, and like practically everyone else who has one, I love it. The best $400 I spent last year. Er...well, that is after my fiance's engagement ring, of course. (Whew! Close call, buddy! Good save!) Even when my first one died in less than three months my love didn't falter (well, not for long anyway), because thanks to the complete and utter incompetance of Best Buy's so-called Geek Squad (a completely unearned moniker, just ask any real geek) I now have a 40GB 4th-generation iPod instead of a 20GB 3rd-generation pod. And my original G3 accessories--thanks again, Best Buy! Chumps!
I love my iPod, except for one thing: iTunes. I fucking hate iTunes, and I don't care who knows it. Not long ago I had a conversation with adult bedwetter Blue Mule during a musical catching-up session, and found out we both feel pretty much the same way about iTunes. I don't feel that it's necessarilly a bad program, it's just that the way I use my iPod is fundamentally different from the way iTunes thinks I should be using my iPod. Instead, I (and Blue Mule as well) use Anapod Explorer, which, along with a vast list of other improvements over iTunes, fully supports copying music on your iPod back to your PC.
Where am I going with all this? Not far at all, really. You're watching me spend 20 minutes putting my shoes on to go for a 5 minute walk. However, I digress...
One thing all iPod users have had to contend with from time to time is finding that a CD on their iPod isn't tagged correctly, causing vital information (like the song or album title, artist, or track number) to go missing. Without track numbers, the iPod plays a CD's songs in alphabetical order, which in my experience is almost never the order the artist intended. This makes a CD pretty much unplayable on an iPod, unless you know the correct order off the top of your head and don't mind manually adding each song into a playlist to reorder them, and I do happen to mind. Usually I can fix the problem quickly and painlessly in my preferred ID3 tag editor, Dr. Tag, recopy the CD to the iPod, and all is well. However, sometimes the iPod will get a real bug up its pristine white ass about a particular CD, forcing me to edit the tracks directly on the iPod using Anapod Explorer. While a little easier to use than iTunes' tag editor, it is an annoying and time-consuming process, made all the more annoying by the knowledge that it's so quick and easy to do in Dr. Tag.
This morning I tried to listen to "Echoes", a 2-disc Pink Floyd best-of compilation, which I had recently copied to my iPod. Lo and behold, the songs, all 26 of them, appeared in alphabetical order on the iPod, with an album title of "unknown". I fired up Dr. Tag, found that the files were indeed missing information from the v2 ID3 tag, made the corrections (very quick, very easy), and recopied the files to the iPod. No dice. iPod still didn't know what album they were from or what their sequence was. So I had to edit each track individually in Anapod to provide the track numbers. I'm listening to "Echoes" right now and I'm enjoying it, but I sure had to work for it.
My point? It's always the BIG ones! This never happens with a small CD. My iPod didn't have a problem with Meshuggah's one-song "I" EP. The five tracks on Floyd's "Animals" CD never gave me trouble with their tags. No, my iPod seems to like to save this particular little bug for CDs with lots of songs on 'em. A 2-disc Floyd set? Sure, let me fuck up that one! I should state for the record that I've also had to perform this annoying proceedure with Pig Destroyer's "38 Counts of Battery" CD, and you can guess how many tracks that one has.
Fucking iPod. I love it. The piece of shit.
I've had an iPod for about a year, and like practically everyone else who has one, I love it. The best $400 I spent last year. Er...well, that is after my fiance's engagement ring, of course. (Whew! Close call, buddy! Good save!) Even when my first one died in less than three months my love didn't falter (well, not for long anyway), because thanks to the complete and utter incompetance of Best Buy's so-called Geek Squad (a completely unearned moniker, just ask any real geek) I now have a 40GB 4th-generation iPod instead of a 20GB 3rd-generation pod. And my original G3 accessories--thanks again, Best Buy! Chumps!
I love my iPod, except for one thing: iTunes. I fucking hate iTunes, and I don't care who knows it. Not long ago I had a conversation with adult bedwetter Blue Mule during a musical catching-up session, and found out we both feel pretty much the same way about iTunes. I don't feel that it's necessarilly a bad program, it's just that the way I use my iPod is fundamentally different from the way iTunes thinks I should be using my iPod. Instead, I (and Blue Mule as well) use Anapod Explorer, which, along with a vast list of other improvements over iTunes, fully supports copying music on your iPod back to your PC.
Where am I going with all this? Not far at all, really. You're watching me spend 20 minutes putting my shoes on to go for a 5 minute walk. However, I digress...
One thing all iPod users have had to contend with from time to time is finding that a CD on their iPod isn't tagged correctly, causing vital information (like the song or album title, artist, or track number) to go missing. Without track numbers, the iPod plays a CD's songs in alphabetical order, which in my experience is almost never the order the artist intended. This makes a CD pretty much unplayable on an iPod, unless you know the correct order off the top of your head and don't mind manually adding each song into a playlist to reorder them, and I do happen to mind. Usually I can fix the problem quickly and painlessly in my preferred ID3 tag editor, Dr. Tag, recopy the CD to the iPod, and all is well. However, sometimes the iPod will get a real bug up its pristine white ass about a particular CD, forcing me to edit the tracks directly on the iPod using Anapod Explorer. While a little easier to use than iTunes' tag editor, it is an annoying and time-consuming process, made all the more annoying by the knowledge that it's so quick and easy to do in Dr. Tag.
This morning I tried to listen to "Echoes", a 2-disc Pink Floyd best-of compilation, which I had recently copied to my iPod. Lo and behold, the songs, all 26 of them, appeared in alphabetical order on the iPod, with an album title of "unknown". I fired up Dr. Tag, found that the files were indeed missing information from the v2 ID3 tag, made the corrections (very quick, very easy), and recopied the files to the iPod. No dice. iPod still didn't know what album they were from or what their sequence was. So I had to edit each track individually in Anapod to provide the track numbers. I'm listening to "Echoes" right now and I'm enjoying it, but I sure had to work for it.
My point? It's always the BIG ones! This never happens with a small CD. My iPod didn't have a problem with Meshuggah's one-song "I" EP. The five tracks on Floyd's "Animals" CD never gave me trouble with their tags. No, my iPod seems to like to save this particular little bug for CDs with lots of songs on 'em. A 2-disc Floyd set? Sure, let me fuck up that one! I should state for the record that I've also had to perform this annoying proceedure with Pig Destroyer's "38 Counts of Battery" CD, and you can guess how many tracks that one has.
Fucking iPod. I love it. The piece of shit.
posted by Yomper at 6:43 AM
1 Comments:
Yep, I use Anapod Explorer and love it. I don't seem to have as much of a problem with the ID tags as my anal retentive, beastiality loving, scat fetishist friend.
Unlike the perv who hosts this blog, I actually purchase much of my music from Itunes (I don't have the time to get MP3's the way he does). Itunes has a great selection of music and I really enjoy being able to preview material before I buy it.
But what I absolutely hate - and Yomper the pigf&*ker would agree with me on this, is the proprietary encoding Apple uses to prohobit the file owner from doing anything "untoward" with the files. It's a pain in the ass that I can't play Itunes files in a great program like Winamp.
Enter the hacker. I just love talented geeks who see fit to target large software companies with their superpowers. There is a program called JHymn that allows me the ability to "scrub" the security programming out of the itunes files and actually convert them to a universally useful file format. I highly recommend it to anyone who uses Itunes to buy music and hates it. It's free and it rocks.
Here's the URL for it:
http://www.hymn-project.org/jhymndoc/#downloads
Mule
Read my blog (a link is on this blog) - I don't use my writing to compensate for a small penis size like Yomper does.
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