RebKell's Junkie Boards

[sambista]

i'm an entrenched mac person, though the more years that pass since steve jobs left us, the more unhappy i am with apple's direction. case in point: itunes, which served so many faithfully and now holds us captive for managing our music and allowing us to customize what we put on our various i-devices (when our total music library is too large).

not only has apple abandoned itunes - which i consider tantamount to microsoft abandoning word - but what's left of it is seriously whack. sometimes i look at my phone and see that the cd/playlist art has magically changed, with some playlists showing the same art. then it changes back to normal just as mysteriously. not to mention nefarious things going on behind the scenes, like music i've imported disappearing. then there are other "features" that simply don't work.

i'm at the point where it makes me nervous to use itunes to "sync" my phone, my ipad and my old, old, beloved ipod nano.

so. the hunt is on for the best itunes alternative. one that is mac-friendly.

i like spotify, though i really don't use it, but i have no idea what its capabilities are in terms of managing a personal music library, imported music and what i want to add to my i-devices.

i also have iMazing, which seems to be robust, but i haven't put it through its paces as a music manager because i was still relying on itunes.

what alternatives should i be exploring? thanks in advance.

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no justice, no peace.

[FrozenLVFan]

I use AirMore to transfer music from my PC to my iPhone, and it has a lot of other functions too that I haven't fully explored. It's upside is that it's not iTunes and it let's me play music, and the downside is that the phone interface for music isn't that great. I've been using DocsToGo for documents so I've never tried AirMore for that. Then I use Utiful to sort and store photos on my phone because it works way better for than the native iPhone photos app.

That's a lot of cobbling together simply because iTunes sucks. I miss my old Blackberry's whose native apps just plain worked.

[Richard 77]

Funny... I'm not having any problems with iTunes. I use it more for video than music though.

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If you cannot inspire yourself to read a book about women's basketball, or any book about women's sports, you cannot inspire any young girl or boy to write a book about them. http://www.lulu.com/spotlight/Richardstrek

[sambista]

[FrozenLVFan]

[jammerbirdi]

Well. I don't know if I can offer much.

I'm sure you know most of this.

So I'm already running Catalina on my Mac Book Pro. I think I just had an update within the last few days but I believe Catalina was already the OS for a while. I don't pay that much attention any more. But as far as syncing across Apple devices, that all happens automatically and instantly now. At least on later products, and has for years.

Spotify is wonderful. But it doesn't, as far as I know, provide access to your own music files. But it is really really worth the money. It's easy to make playlists. It's rare shit that I have found not to be on Spotify. It's just very convenient and no hassle and essential at this point.

However, I am like you. And there is nothing that can ever even come close to the deep emotional bond I have with my own accumulated music files. So that is like going home and I have spent a lot of time and effort making sure I was able to get back to the place I wanted to be in terms of accessing my own 50 gigs of mp3 files.

This is where any help I could offer must end, however. Because I despised iTunes and never found on any Apple platform anything that was usable for me or remotely made me happy or replaced in any way shape or form WinAmp, the Windows application that allowed me to enjoy my music for almost two decades on PCs.

As I switched to Macs as my main computers I lost all my joy for my mp3s. They were on the Macs' hard drives, but were as inscrutable as anything to me. It was murder.

And other things as well being on a Mac. So I went back to a desktop PC for a number of years. I bbought this Macbook Pro which, as you can see, has the problem with the keyboard that often doubbles up on the letter 'b.' I ain't faking there.

So, because of the short strike and errors on the keyboard and all the other issues on the MacBook Pro, which is a god dammed supercomputer otherwise, and I use it all the time for photos, I just recently copped a new Thinkpad X1 Carbon which has all the internals that the MacBook Pro has, and more, with the exception of a graphics card.

Anyway. Here's the deal. So WinAmp, the computer program that has made me happier in my life than any other, went by the wayside. For almost a decade. I still had it on an old PC for most of the aughts but that PC was dying. Then some guys resurrected it and updated it for later versions of Windows. So it's back. Unofficially, but it's back.

So I have WinAmp now. And, the greatest thing about WinAmp is how you make your playlists. I go through my windows folders of music, which are like old familiar friends, right click on a song to get a context menu, and there is the magic button to paradise, Enqueue in Winamp. Bam. I'm off like it's 2004.

I wish this was available for a Mac. You'd love it. It's so uncomplicated. And it gives you such a personal connection to your own, often hard to find, music. Anyway.

Apple is a strange company. Can't live with them, can't live without them.

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Every woman who has ever been presented with a career/sex quid pro quo in the entertainment industry should come forward and simply say, “Me, too.” - jammer The New York Times 10/10/17

[sambista]

i loved itunes as a true music manager, and that was pretty much it. i never cared for the "store." but if i simply played a music file, it became part of my music library, and i could tweak what it was called and whether it was part of a playlist, and whether playlists were part of a folder and all that, or not. if not, itunes managed it for me. and syncing was an extension of that, adding new playlists to my i-devices.

that's what i need. a manager of my music inventory.

_________________
no justice, no peace.

[sambista]

[FrozenLVFan]

[Richard 77]

[Luuuc]

[stever]

[sambista]