iBuddies no iLonger
This one starts with a ~sigh~.
I really thought I’d reconciled my differences with Apple, k’know. I thought that, while we were never going to be bestest friends in the whole world, that at lease we were going to maintain a civil relationship, one based on mutual respect.
I was wrong.
In the last 24 hours I have found out that:
When I was thinking of buying an external drive enclosure I needed to decide between Firewire, USB2 or combo. I decided on a USB2 one because, hey, USB is prettymuch a ubiquitous format. every computer has USB, or at least every computer that I use. Many computers have firewire as well now, but if it was going to cost an extra $80 or so to get a firewire capable drive, and I wasn’t really going to even use firewire that often, well that’s just not a smart option.
Turns out that I gave Apple way too much credit. G4 Powermacs built before January 2003 don’t have any USB2 support, and even these ones didn’t have it enabled by default, or even official drivers. This would be why my external USB2 drive was trying to take 4 hours to copy a couple of gigs of video from the uni G4 (a recent one mind you) last night. I’ve got machines ranging from 2 to about 18 months old here with me at the moment, and they all came with USB2 support right out of the box. It only took me about 3 minutes to copy a couple of gigs worth of MP3s from removeable drive to laptop after iTunes killed my directory structure. And that brings us to our second revelation.
iTunes. Kind of cool, but containing irredeemable fatal flaw. I’ve ranted at length about how annoying it is when programs think they know better than you do. We’re all aware of that. Well iTunes took this even further than my previously (and still, and forever) most hated program of all time (yes, it’s Realplayer, no link for those cancerous scabs).
I was having a bit of fun with iTunes, checking it out, deciding if it was worth giving a serious go with my musical entertainment duties. It was looking pretty good so I decided that yeah, sure, it can look after my music for a while, we can get to know each other well, I like that rating thing, the smart playlists look about as good as Moodlogic but with a shitload less effort. So I click the “keep iTunes music folder organized” button. Big mistake.
From: Jaymis
To: Rainer
Subject: WARNING, WARNING, DANGER WILL ROBINSON, FUCKIN ITUNES
hey man, I just downloaded itunes, was playing with it.
Don’t let it organize your mp3 folder. it’ll fuck everything up into a completely stupid system of folders.
I’m looking for plugins or something to make it less dumb.
J
/more to come
[...] In my time as an MP3 consumer I’ve used a plethora of players, both hard- and software. In the early days, developers racing to add new features had me switching and trying out new applications regularly, but by the late 90s I was a dedicated Winamp user, even through the troublesome Winamp3 days. This all had to change. When faced with a year travelling and working in Europe I decided to retire my trusty 256MB “James” and replace him with a shiny, white, inevitable, 20GB (3rd Gen) iPod. After considerable wrangling (warning NSFW language and unrelated ranting in comments) I grudgingly switched to iTunes, which is an ok piece of software. Really. If all of your music comes to you via iTunes music store or major label CDs you’ve faithfully purchased and ripped (after reading and understanding any included EULAs) then you probably won’t ever need or want another media player. iTunes also has some truly fantastic features: Coupled with judicious iPod-based rating while travelling, Party Shuffle and Smart Playlists changed how I listen to music. [...]
27-09-2006@13:52