Some good news for the music industry

    You know, I've purchased doubles of stuff since it's such a PIA to get things on your iPhone. But even then, it's trouble. iTunes takes off things you haven't checked the box on there (if you are selective and not importing every song you own) And downloading them to your iTunes changes each version. Plus you sometimes find songs on your phone greyed out unitl you update again, again.

    It's a mess. I remember just using an SD card with my Android, things in folders the way I liked them. Now, importing them to iPhone, I have to retag them. I even got messed up tags downloading FROM iTunes (recently downloaded Hamilton and the tags had it into 2 separate albums. Tried to refund it and Apple said "no" and told me to delete it and redownload. BUT the download was greyed out on the phone and on iTunes and I had to find it under my user name, whereas it used to be under a menu option. It's F$#@ up)

    So I'm desperately trying to decide if I should go back to Android. Picking a song on the iPhone is asking for automotive death. There's gotta be an easier way to do music.

    Oh, I made a playlist on iTunes. Imported it to the phone. Later, deleted it from the phone. It then deleted it from my iTunes. Gone.

    At this point, I wouldn't blame any non-musician (anyone without skin in the game or professional courtesy) for stealing music if it's this difficult.

    Anyhow, what are some solutions you guys have used. I gotta be missing something here.

    Just pay $10 a month for Spotify. Problems solved and you will be listening to music you never would have paid for before!

    My daughter got Spotify. Seems cool.

    I could see doing that as a part of the musical spectrum.

    But how can I do playlists of songs I want in an order for, say, road trips? That doesn't require re-tagging, improving, updating, etc.

    Quote from KPA_Leader


    Just pay $10 a month for Spotify. Problems solved and you will be listening to music you never would have paid for before!


    This is true for me as well.

    That said, I have NEVER EVER had the problems wit iTunes that Dennis mentioned above.
    Find it way easier to manage my > 1100 ripped CD's collection with iTunes than in my pre Apple days when I used other solutions.

    Quote from Zappledan

    Is Spotify good for musicians? Seems to me that I've read articles regarding how little royalties are generated.

    That's true for most, if not all, streaming services, and it's why I buy my music rather than stream (I'll stream to check out an album before purchase, though). The paid tier SUPPOSEDLY gives more to artists, but as I understand it, it gives progressively more to the most popular artists compared to the ones of lesser popularity. One more reason to buy rather than stream :)

    I was going to use iTunes for my ripped CD's. Problem is, I didn't alway tag everything right. "The Beatles" then "Beatles" sometimes a misspelling and I gotta go back and do it all. Plus I didn't put in album covers.

    But the worst is iTunes doubles and even triples when you port it. Going to SSD, moving my library to the iMac. iTunes sometimes just re-reads parts of a library and doubles/triples things and cleaning it up, even with apps made to do just that (if they make apps for it, it's a problem, right?) don't do a good job and is just as time consuming.

    So I've decided iTunes just isn't trustworthy. I'd rather keep my files in a folder tree and drops/drag what I need to a player. It's like putting on a record yourself instead of buying a jukebox that may break down.

    Quote from Zappledan

    Is Spotify good for musicians? Seems to me that I've read articles regarding how little royalties are generated.

    I read an article by Walter Trout's wife about how little they made from Amazon. I think it's the same the World over. I see many musicians of high calibre coming on stage peddling their own CDs from suitcases because they seem to get more of a return like this than from the retailers etc.... It's a crying shame...

    Quote from Freisegler

    I read an article by Walter Trout's wife about how little they made from Amazon. I think it's the same the World over. I see many musicians of high calibre coming on stage peddling their own CDs from suitcases because they seem to get more of a return like this than from the retailers etc.... It's a crying shame...


    Yes, this is what I read. We as musicians need to support ourselves in this matter, don't you think?

    Go for it now. The future is promised to no one. - Wayne Dyer

    Wasn't that the story even from the In Rainbows album from Radiohead? Given out free asking for Donations yielded the same amount per CD as the typical sales when they released the CD later on (like 6 months later)

    That means a LOT offered nothing, many offered the prevalent price $10 and the others in-between and more to average $5 a CD. Which is what they got from the record company they said (well they were along in their career to command that price I'm sure)

    In today's age, they can just do it from their website if you ask me. Like profiles here. Some freebies. Most paid for.

    Quote from Ingolf


    This is true for me as well.

    That said, I have NEVER EVER had the problems wit iTunes that Dennis mentioned above.
    Find it way easier to manage my > 1100 ripped CD's collection with iTunes than in my pre Apple days when I used other solutions.

    That's a lot of CDs, @Ingolf, good for you!

    I have about 400, including some box sets. I'm having a bit of trouble getting them here to Singapore from back home because the rules on CD imports here state that you have to get permission from a government ministry! So I'm now thinking that making my purchases on iTunes would be a better way to manage things.

    Luckily I have most of them on my iPod already. But I still think that CDs are the best way to buy music, I love flipping through the booklet every now and then and reading stories about my favourite bands.

    Irrespective of whether the artist gets less from streaming services, I think it's better to get something rather than have your IP just pilfered and getting nothing. Perhaps this will change in future, I heard that Taylor Swift sued Apple for more money. Perhaps there will be some sort of class action suit in future by musicians against such services demanding a bigger share of the profit.

    Do you have a link to that taylor swift thing? It wasn't the thing about three months free trial on their streaming service (as opposed to regular sales)? If so, it never came to a trial - just an open letter :)

    I think iTunes gives a good share of the price, as I recall. Of course, the money goes through the record company, not directly to the artist.

    Quote from Zappledan

    Is Spotify good for musicians? Seems to me that I've read articles regarding how little royalties are generated.

    Yup. A poofteenth of a cent per play.

    Still, it's a start.

    Quote from db9091

    I was going to use iTunes for my ripped CD's. Problem is, I didn't alway tag everything right. "The Beatles" then "Beatles" sometimes a misspelling and I gotta go back and do it all. Plus I didn't put in album covers.

    That's not iTunes' fault, db, as you well know, you naughty boy!

    Quote from db9091

    But the worst is iTunes doubles and even triples when you port it. Going to SSD, moving my library to the iMac. iTunes sometimes just re-reads parts of a library and doubles/triples things...

    Never happened to me, and I completely replace my library on my home-stereo setup (laptop hooked up through FireWire to a MOTU 828mkIII Hybrid and then on to powered monitors) every month or three in order to keep up with the desktop library, which is where all the editing and expansion action happens.

    I replace the Library.itl file (I also do the xml one for good measure, even 'though it's intended for other apps) and use a portable WD USB drive to host the library. I employ the "old" system where the media is housed in an "iTunes Music" folder, wherever one wishes to keep it.

    Everything has artwork and is properly tagged; I even clear all tags before adding my own. I also use my own system which results in the folders in the iTunes Music folder being Genres, and not artists, and therefore it’s a much more practical-to-navigate, copy-or-whatever system. Within those folders, albums appear with the artists' names prepended to them. It's been awesome, and I wouldn't trade it for anything. I'm still on v11.1.5 and won't upgrade unless it becomes an absolute necessity. I mean, I love what I have so much I'd be extremely nervous about risking losing it.

    Add to this the fact that I've never had a crash. Not one, and that the app opens almost instantly even 'though there're tens of thousands of files in there. Never had a playlist go missing. Only lost contact with individual songs when I stupidly and accidentally moved them, which in every instance was corrected by copying them back to where they belonged and double-clicking them again in iTunes.

    It must be stressed, I reckon, that I've been the beneficiary of this awesome performance through my own hard work. I undertook the momentous task of rebuilding my library from scratch again around 2011:

    I re-ripped all my CDs using LAME in Audacity at 320k True Stereo (not interleaved, combined or whatever it's called 'cause I heard it can cause imaging discrepancies), because I'd previously used iTunes' built-in option, which, even at 320k is vastly inferior as far as detail and HF response are concerned, probably because Apple would've deemed the speed of the conversion process critical to the masses, I'm guessing, and therefore chose to expedite it greatly.

    Splitting the post at this point 'cause it was greater than 10 000 characters...

    I then, as I suggested earlier, wiped all tags (metadata) including pics, and re-entered it all:

    I downloaded fresh artwork, converted it all to jpeg, resized it all to 1400->1800pix across depending upon the quality of the original files, reduced the footprint of the images to between 50 and 200k, again, depending upon the nature of the originals, with the occasional exception where the artwork was remarkable, in which case I allowed sizes of up to 350k, but only where the number of songs (files, which house the artwork because it was provided manually as opposed to the iTunes store where it's saved directly in the "Album Artwork" folder in the User/Music/iTunes folder), was low. I also used a standard for the naming of all these files - 01 Front 02... 0x Inner and 0x Back, thereby, hopefully, helping iTunes in some small way through this simplicity or perhaps metadata editing at some point in the future through another app or whatever.

    Lastly, as I also suggested earlier, during the process of retagging everything, I reorganised my library so that iTunes thought the genres were artists. The albums are still beautifully reflected in the "picture" mode, but I use the "all-songs" mode of display. The genres are playlists in the left-hand sidebar, so one selects a genre by clicking one of them, and then the songs, ordered alphabetically by artist and then album name, appear just as they do in the folders (genre) in my iTunes Music folder on my drive, but without themselves being in folders, of course; one is faced with a long list instead. I keep these lists for each side-bar category (genre) sorted alphabetically by album name (the header-click option). All songs and multi-albums were numbered. I established naming conventions such as standards for CD numbers and bit rates when not 320k (CD1, CD2, [256k], [VBR 135-186] etc.), using spaces instead of "-" between artist and album names so that live albums appeared first in the lists before studio ones, and the term "Compilation" in a similar manner. This way compilations appear first, followed by live albums and then studio ones, for every artist. While I was at it I corrected all spelling errors and the incorrect use of capital letters in all song and album titles.

    I can't even imagine what a mess the average person's library would look like, especially the ridiculous number of folders that'd be sitting at the root level of their iTunes Music folders, but I do feel that this "simplification" of my library through the cleaning of tags (manually, no silly apps here), standardisation of artwork and the use of naming conventions as well as my "simpler" genre-grouped organisation has played a role, if in no other way than to make management and navigation far simpler and fruitful.

    Now, I totally get that most folks probably just slap their music in there and hope for the best, but that's not how I roll. I also get the fact that Apple would've had to have taken this into account when developing the app, but there's only so much it can do. That's not to say that more couldn't be done, especially, IMHO, where built-in utilities that'd save messing with 3rd-party apps are concerned, but to balance this apparent shortcoming, there's a world of iTunes Scripts out there that are mighty handy and run flawlessly within the app, such as “Hubi's iTunes Scripts”.

    I s'pose what I'm saying is that whilst it's not a guarantee of flawless performance (although it has been for me thus far, touch wood), being organised in the way one uses the app may well ameliorate to a great extent the issues one might encounter down the track. The way I look at it is that smooth, glitch-free perusal of our precious music libraries is so very important to us, especially as musicians or indeed just as music lovers, that it's a small price to pay to undertake the sort of "cleaning" and reorganisation of our libraries that I did. I'm not suggesting one need go as far as I, but in my experience the greater the input, the greater the reward.

    Whichever way you go, db, and whichever app you finally settle on, may I wish you all the very best and keep my fingers crossed it all works out well? Thanks mate.

    Quote from db9091

    ... and cleaning it up, even with apps made to do just that (if they make apps for it, it's a problem, right?) don't do a good job and is just as time consuming.

    Agreed - it can be a problem, but most of those apps are cleanup-style for the very reason that folks are lazy in the manner that they add things to their libraries. So yes, there is a problem in these cases, but it's not Apple's doing.

    Quote from db9091

    So I've decided iTunes just isn't trustworthy. I'd rather keep my files in a folder tree and drops/drag what I need to a player. It's like putting on a record yourself instead of buying a jukebox that may break down.

    Well, it's been 100% trustworthy for me, but at the price I outlined exhaustively.

    Had I not undertaken that immense task, which took around 4 years to complete(!), I'd surely have done precisely what you're thinking of doing, Dennis.

    Interestingly, one of the reasons I grouped things the way I did was so that my iTunes Music folder would effectively double as the sort of repository you're talking about... and it does. As I suggested earlier, it serves beautifully as the central point from which I can easily drag anything I need to to USB stick or whatever, the fact that all songs are numbered being one of many bonuses, along with the fact that all artwork is embedded in the files. The genre-grouping at the root level is the jewel in the crown ‘though, IMHO.

    Dang. There's my afternoon! Hopefully this helps somebody in some small way; this is after all why we do this stuff, eh?

    Cheers mate.

    EDIT 1
    It occurred to me that the artist-being-genres thing might've been confusing, so here's how I did it:

    In the "Get Info" window, the "Artist" field simply reflected (copy / pasted from the "Genre" field, and always in that direction so as to avoid the generation of new genres through inadvertent addition of unwanted characters; even a blank space will create a new genre) the genre field. The artists' names were prepended to the album titles in the "Album" field. Done!

    EDIT 2
    I removed some attempted toilet humour.

    Great explanation Monkey Man!
    This works perfectly for me also as long as the iTunes versions are the same.
    The key is to move the library as well as the files.
    I replicate my library of 9,000 tunes across 4 Macs this way with very little trouble.

    Quote from Monkey_Man

    I replace the Library.itl file (I also do the xml one for good measure, even 'though it's intended for other apps) and use a portable WD USB drive to host the library. I employ the "old" system where the media is housed in an "iTunes Music" folder, wherever one wishes to keep it.

    Quote from nightlight

    Thanks to digital streaming subscriptions, global music sales rose for the first time since 1998

    The share going to songwriters and musicians is still shrinking. The music industry once delivered value in the form of industrial production and distribution. With the exception of studios and post-production, they now represent mostly greed, waste of space and wasted money.

    Quote from Gizmo

    Great explanation Monkey Man!
    This works perfectly for me also as long as the iTunes versions are the same.
    The key is to move the library as well as the files.
    I replicate my library of 9,000 tunes across 4 Macs this way with very little trouble.


    Hey, my pleasure, Gizmo.

    Of course, in order to replicate column spacing and which ones are active and so on, the User / Lib / Preferences files need to be copied as well. There's one at the root level (the other two can be ignored if you never use the Helper or EQ), called "com.apple.iTunes.plist", that's critical. I copy the two in the "ByHost" folder for good measure as well, only because I've never bothered to find out what they're for and the fact that one of them updates regularly where the other hasn't done so in 2 years.

    Glad it's working well for you Gizmo; just a stab in the dark, but I'm guessing you're pretty organised in the way you use it and have set it up.

    Monkey_Man,

    Well the "db" stands for "Daily Bread" and the 90 is the 90th psalm where the 9th verse first line says "All our days pass away..."
    It's to remind me of my mother who died when I was very young. But she used to read me that psalm all the time.