I LOVE the smell of dead ZUNE!!!

ryanjoachim

shack wrote: »

However...I can say with 100% certainty that Steve Jobs has never crossed MY mind while showering.... Just sayin'.

Ditto.

Although there was that one time when I was taking a crap...

maximillian

bobman1235 wrote: »

That's only kind of true. At least for a normal iPod this would be fine, but if you're using a Touch or iPhone, it's not a real solution because Apps and other things HAVE to sync with iTunes, and firmware updates only come from iTunes as well. So for day-to-day stuff you could probbaly ditch iTunes but you'd still need to keep it around for other things.

Actually, do Apps need to sync? You can buy and install them via Wifi. Is there any point to having them backed up on your computer? If your iPod dies, can Apple just transfer your purchases to another iPod and simply redownload them?

Firmware updates seem infrequent so I guess you could fire up iTunes just for that. Or does iTunes then reject songs that sync'ed via MediaMonkey once the new firmware is loaded?

I ask these things because I am starting to think about MM as an alternative. I really want to keep the iTunes folder structure so hopefully MM supports that. I know MM doesn't directly import the Library.xml file, but I can recreate the structure if I only have to do it once. So will MM work alongside iTunes so I can use it for day-to-day stuff and only use iTunes for firmware and other updates?

cstmar01

Good questions Max as I'm wondering something similar. I wanted to move to a different media player but didn't know how well it would integrate with my iphone and ipods that I have been using and didn't want to have to redo all 75 gigs of music I have as it gets annoying really quick.

maximillian

If no one knows off-hand, I will probably try it out tonight. I can't do a firmware update since I have mine jailbroken and don't want that messed up.

bobman1235

I suppose you do not have to sync / back up your apps via iTunes. However if you do have something catastrophic happen and have to re-download all your apps you'd lose any data if it wasn't backed up in iTunes.

And max, 4.3.1 has been Jailbroken as of... yesterday I think. I plan on upgrading and re-jailbreaking tonight, in fact. http://www.redmondpie.com/jailbreak-iphone-4.3.1-untethered-on-windows-using-sn0wbreeze-2.5-how-to-tutorial/

cokewithvanilla

My phone is still on 4.1 .. i was considering ugrading.. I wish I just stuck with 3.1.3.. ever since 4.1 my battery drain has been crazy... not to mention that running applications in the background, in the manner that it is done on the iphone, is incredibly stupid. Backgrounder was much better

has anyone noticed battery issues since 4.0?

markmarc

There is no question that the iTunes software needs a complete rewrite. It's been patched to handle new demands that Apple has placed on it, but in the process it has left the program more open to failure. Secondly, some users desire capabilities outside of what Apple either deemed appropriate or within comfort level of their "ecosystem".

I would speculate their is fear in a complete rewrite as how things are accomplished by the user may change creating trepidation and frustration. One only has to look at anxiety of Office users as the switched from 2003 version to 2007-10 with the ribbons and other tools in all new places. Eventually, Apple will have to pull the trigger and when it does then we will be able to tell how much Apple has learned from the competition.

bobman1235

cokewithvanilla wrote: »

My phone is still on 4.1 .. i was considering ugrading.. I wish I just stuck with 3.1.3.. ever since 4.1 my battery drain has been crazy... not to mention that running applications in the background, in the manner that it is done on the iphone, is incredibly stupid. Backgrounder was much better

has anyone noticed battery issues since 4.0?

I've read that 4.3 had some battery performance tweaks but I'm not sure. I've never really had any problems with battery things.

maximillian

I started playing with MM and found out that it cannot sync nested or hierarchical playlists to iPods. The developers are thinking of adding this feature to version 4 though. Without this feature MM is a no-go for me.

http://www.mediamonkey.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=4&t=53918

http://www.mediamonkey.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=4&t=43972

BeefJerky

Wow, it is definitely ashame that the Zune is dead. Competition is always a good thing in a marketplace.

That being said, I use an iPod for my dedicated music player, albeit somewhat reluctantly. I despise iTunes, but since I don't have to touch it often I live with it. The reasons I use an iPod are as follows:
1) 120GB capacity - therefore able to hold my entire music collection
2) Interfaces directly with my Kenwood DNX8120 head unit

At the time I went this route no head units that I could find supported other devices. In addition, there were no Zune's made with such high capacity (and still aren't). To get that capacity outside of Apple, one needs to go with a more obscure brand with no head unit support.

As of now, there simply isn't a phone that has the capacity that would allow me to do away with a separate player. Mind you, I really only use the iPod in the car, and it stays in my glove box. I do keep some of my favorite music in the 32GB on my phone, and that is convenient. When phones can offer 80GB+ capacity, I will most certainly consider doing away with my iPod. However, I would still like to be able to interface it directly with a head unit.

Amherst

BeefJerky wrote: »

As of now, there simply isn't a phone that has the capacity that would allow me to do away with a separate player. Mind you, I really only use the iPod in the car, and it stays in my glove box. I do keep some of my favorite music in the 32GB on my phone, and that is convenient. When phones can offer 80GB+ capacity, I will most certainly consider doing away with my iPod. However, I would still like to be able to interface it directly with a head unit.

The droid phones can carry the capacity you speak of and more.

exalted512

bigaudiofanatic wrote: »

So all major car manufactures that have factory ipod integration and almost every aftermarket head unit supporting ipod is not 95%?

If you're talking about new cars, then I'd say about 30% come with iPod integration. My 2011 GMC Acadia didnt come with it...and it has remote start, power lift gate, bluetooth radio...hell, I can even start/unlock/lock the car from my phone without having to buy anything but the car...all that, no iPod integration.

If you're talking about cars on the road, I'd say about 95% of them do NOT have iPod integration.

-Cody

bobman1235

Amherst wrote: »

The droid phones can carry the capacity you speak of and more.

Show me a single phone, Droid or otherwise, that has the 80GB+ capacity he was talking about.

AsSiMiLaTeD

I'm not a big fan of iTunes, but I have found a workable method for using the software that's fairly painless. This works for my full music collection (4500 or so CDs) and the music my wife buys from iTunes, all together in the same library.

I'm very deliberate about managing my music. My friends have told me I'm too anal about it, until they come over and see how easy it is to browse through taht ginormous music collection, then they're converted :-)

1 - I rip CDs using dbPowerAmp because I can set up multiple profiles and rip a lossless and an mp3 file at the same time. It also tags the files and grabs the artwork for me as well. It does well with the tags, but I don't like other programs tagging my music because they're still not always consistent and I just like having more control over my tags, so the next step is necessary
2 - I organize the music I've just ripped into a 'static' folder structure that I've always used, for me that structure is 'Genre\Artist\Album\title.mp3 or flac'.
3 - I then use Tag&Rename to do 2 things on the music I just added, first I do a batch remove on all the tags that are there to get rid of what dbPowerAmp stamped there, then I use a built in function to obtain the tag information from the folder and filename structure. I wrote a script a long time ago to do the latter, but the programs is much faster and is more flexible. This approach is very fast and flexible and lets me have my music tagged exactly how I want. I have ALOT of movie scores, and it's very common to have those automatically tagged with multiple artists. The Dark Knight, for example, is one I'm burning as we speak. dbPowerAmp or MediaMonkey both want to tag the artist as Hans Zimmer, james newton howard, etc etc. I just want it tagged as hans Zimmer, so I drop that album in the hans zimmer folder in the soundtracks section, do this step, and voila, tagged just as I want!
4 - Then I open up MediaMonkey and add the album to my library there. I use MediaMonkey for 2 things, to play the files when I listen directly on the PC, and to complete this step, the tagging of the album artwork. dpPwerAmp copied the artwork to a folder.jpg file and placed it in the folder of each album in step 1 and it also tagged the files with that image. However, when I erased the tags in step 3 above I also broke that link, so now I need to recreate it. MediaMonkey has a built in scrip called Album Art Tagger that tags the individual songs with the album art from an image file, I tell it to tag the album art using the folder.jpg that got created in step 1, really quick and simple.

That's it, my music is now fully tagged and ready to go. That sounds like a lot of work, but it's really not. If you're ripping music, step 1 takes the same amount of time anyway, so that's a wash. I just measured the time for steps 2 thru 4 (which is what my process really is) and it takes less than 1 minute for an album, and even less time per album if doing more than one because I can basically do 5 albums in that same 1 minute timeframe. So the process is very fast and effective. I'm not saying 'my way is best' but really don't see why more people don't do it this way, its so easy, fast and effective.

Now on to iTunes...

I don't let iTunes do ANYTHING with my music other than sync it or stream it. When I've completed the process above of ripping and tagging my music, I do one of two things depending....
1 - I'm usually just ripping a couple of albums at a time, and so I'll just import those albums directly into iTunes, easy enough and super quick
2 - If I'm ripping a ton of albums at once (not often any more) I'll just blow out the entire iTunes library (as in select all songs and delete) and re-import my entire music collection. It takes a while, but is better than sitting there importing each album one at a time. I haven't done this in quite a while because I'm seldom ripping more than a handful of albums at once because I stay on top of my music collection.

That whole thing SOUNDS like overkill, but it's really quick and just makes the overall experience much smoother when I'm sitting on the couch browsing through my music collection.

ryanjoachim

bobman1235 wrote: »

Show me a single phone, Droid or otherwise, that has the 80GB+ capacity he was talking about.

I assume he's talking about internal storage + SD card storage.

I haven't looked at SD card capacities lately though.

bobman1235

They aren't at 80GB, and even if they are it would be prohibitively expensive.

exalted512

bobman1235 wrote: »

Show me a single phone, Droid or otherwise, that has the 80GB+ capacity he was talking about.

I wonder if android phones only support cards less than XX amount of memory?

This is an old article...and I doubt it'll come true this year since I haven't even seen 64gb micro-sd cards yet...but:
http://www.crunchgear.com/2008/10/21/sandisk-developing-128gb-microsd-cards-for-a-2011-release/

But I'm willing to bet when they come out, a 128GB micro SD card will be more expensive than a full blown 250GB iPod.
-Cody

exalted512

AsSiMiLaTeD wrote: »

1 - I rip CDs using dbPowerAmp because I can set up multiple profiles and rip a lossless and an mp3 file at the same time. It also tags the files and grabs the artwork for me as well. It does well with the tags, but I don't like other programs tagging my music because they're still not always consistent and I just like having more control over my tags, so the next step is necessary

i'm looking to finally get all my CDs to my computer...do you just have the CD Ripper?

I see they have a "Asset? UPnP (DLNA compatible)" program too. Do you have that as well?
-Cody

AsSiMiLaTeD

I have the CD Ripper and Audio Converter (they are sold as one package), never tried the DLNA tool since I've got that covered elsewhere. I wanna say I paid $40 or so for it. It's not really cheap, but is worth it for me.

Another alternative is using just MediaMonkey as it will rip in lossless as well (though some people prefer dbPowerAmp because of AccurateRip). I just happened to have a copy of dbpoweramp I bought a while back when doing some conversions, so I got to upgrade for free and like it.

exalted512

If you were to start from scratch (like me), would you do anything different?

I might hit you up for more info once I start to actually go through the process.
-Cody

EndersShadow

exalted512 wrote: »

If you were to start from scratch (like me), would you do anything different?

I might hit you up for more info once I start to actually go through the process.
-Cody

Check out this thread I started on burning to FLAC. I personally just used dbpoweramp (Free trial for 30 days) + MediaMonkey's free version. Got all my stuff done in about 2 weeks.

exalted512

appreciate the info ender!
-Cod

EndersShadow

exalted512 wrote: »

appreciate the info ender!
-Cod

NP. Only thing I didnt know you could do (wish I did) was burn two copies at once. I just burned FLAC and then converted it to 320 kbps MP3's. Then added those to my Zune library (ironic to talk about it in a thread about Zune's dying) and then deleted duplicates at lower bitrates....Would have been much easier to just do two copies, one into a FLAC folder, another into the artists folder as a high bitrate MP3.

Finished deleting duplicates last night. Keeping the FLAC totally independent from the Windows Media Library and making a zipped copy to put on an external drive.

Once I figure out my method of transport to my system downstairs I have a bit more organizing to do.

If you need to find and delete duplicates there is a program I used called duplicate cleaner I think. It searched all the music files and flagged the ones with similar names, tags, ect and then allowed me to quickly select which ones to keep (newest, highest bitrate, ect) and delete the others. Made it a bit less time consuming....

AsSiMiLaTeD

exalted512 wrote: »

If you were to start from scratch (like me), would you do anything different?

I might hit you up for more info once I start to actually go through the process.
-Cody

Nope, my process has evolved over time, but feel I have the perfect approach now.

Media Monkey is great at tagging, but still not perfect, and when it doesn't get the tags the way I want them it's not as easy to change.

I still feel the best way is to physically organize the music the way you want it and then write the tags based on that file organization. This has two distinct advantages over letting another program do the work for you:

1 - As I mentioned before, you get the files tagged EXACTLY the way you want, 100% of the time.
2 - It gives you better organization and file info at both the tagging level and the physical folder organization level, providing you with more flexibility in browsing your music files via whatever manner you choose. let me explain further...

There are basically two ways you can access and browse your music collection, either via a physical file structure (like you would in Windows Explorer) or via the tag information on the files (like in iTunes or almost any media player/program out there).

The file folder approach is becoming used less and less, but I'm not on board with the whole "people shouldn't know or worry about files" approach, and I ALWAYS want direct view and control over my actual files.

Basing your media tags on your folder structure guarantees that you'll always see the same genre/artist/album info regardless of whether you're pulling up your music on the PC or whether you're browsing in iTunes or whatever.

maximillian

AsSiMiLaTeD wrote: »

The file folder approach is becoming used less and less, but I'm not on board with the whole "people shouldn't know or worry about files" approach, and I ALWAYS want direct view and control over my actual files.

This is how I do it too. I simply have too many different media player types and this is the sure way of ensuring that I can easily find my music across all players. Unfortunately iTunes thinks it knows better and complains occasionally.

AsSiMiLaTeD

I just have all that auto-tagging crap in iTunes turned off and it never gives my any problems...

DMara

The old 30GB Zune is on sale now: http://www.dealextreme.com/p/zune-3-lcd-30gb-wifi-portable-digital-media-player-with-fm-tuner-black-31552
$52.90 shipped for such a device is a pretty hot deal.

maximillian

Some of the comments say it's refurbed. However, still a great price.

Drenis

Zune HD