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Yahoo Downgrades MusicMatch Jukebox
BanjoBob writes "MusicMatch Jukebox has been a bundle of great MP3 and music management applications in one package. Apparently, it is the end of life for this wonderful MP3 player, ripper, catalog, CD player, Internet radio player, purchase outlet, Auto DJ, Super Tagger, and music database. There was nothing not to like about the product. There is nothing to like about the new downgrade, Yahoo! Music Jukebox. MusicMatch users have been getting notices to 'upgrade'; those who have taken the bait are not pleased. The Yahoo! Music Jukebox feedback forum doesn't have much nice to say about the product. Lots of features have gone away and the 'free upgrade' costs about $20."
Hm.. It really goes to show its been awhile since i used windows. i didn't even realize people were still using musicmatch! amarok does all of the above- and with kde4 coming out soon and a gpl qt license for windows i see amarok making its way to the windows desktop soon enough.
Probably Yahoo doesn't want to go into legals affairs with the ripping stuff in MusicMatch, turning this app into a kind of iTunes clone.
Web Design Marbella Paginas Web
Maybe we should petition Apple to create some kind of easy-to-use jukebox software to replace it since they have a lot of experience with GUI design issues because of MacOS. Still, it's unlikely they'd be willing to port such a piece of software to Windows unless they had some incredible financial incentive to do so... perhaps create some type of device that can be used on both Windows PCs and Macs so it would give them an incentive to write this cool jukebox software to run on Windows too?
They ruined their TV listings this year too:r ashed-by-users/
http://www.techcrunch.com/2006/12/03/yahoo-gets-t
Fortunately she's had enough and decided to spend some time over the summer installing and learning to use Linux. At least she hasn't been ripping all her CDs into WMA...
Meta will eat itself
Seriously they should stop with the term upgrade. I never really used the service here in Canada but the mp3 conversion program worked just too well to trust it to survive an "upgrade" so I didn't bite. This becomes another example of how we are slowly losing, know what I mean?
Every time I hear about Yahoo! buying up some part of the internet, a little part of me dies inside. Every single thing they acquire gets made worse as a result. Flickr, OneList/eGroups, etc. It's sad, back when Yahoo! was a search engine + portal, they were probably the most useful web site on the internet, but after google eclipsed their search capability, they quickly became useless to me, despite every attempt they've made at staying relevant by offering email and IM services, etc. They're almost as bad as AOL these days.
You see? You see? Your stupid minds! Stupid! Stupid!
I've had problems with MusicMatch bloat for about 2 years now... EVERY TIME I would launch it, it would take so long to go out and "update" streams, etc.. So I finally gave up. I HAD bought the LIFETIME upgrade YEARS ago on it.. so if someone wants to buy my key...
On the other side, WINAMP is awsome... Supports MORE formats than MusicMatch, and has shoutcast, etc.. Again, software worth supporting.
Plus cool skins in Winamp... DUMP Musicmatch and pick up Winamp, you'll be happy when you need to access you music on the windows platform with it.
-Steve
--- Relax, that mass muderer is just trying to reduce our carbon footprint, one fetus at a time...
Not to mention that it forces you to see their ads every time you start up. Music Match let you start in your music library, but now you see Yahoo's shilling for their products. Their radio stations put ads after every 3 or 4 songs unless you upgrade to their service too. Can anyone suggest another product for me on xp that has comparable features?
Sigs are for losers.
Ok, ok, so it's probably because I haven't used it for about 7 years, but I hated that program with a passion. In fact, I still blame that program for every shitty, joint stereo, artifact laden mp3 on the internet.
Please ignore the irrationality of any opinions stated or implied herein.
The snow doesn't give a soft white damn whom it touches. -- ee cummings
I "upgraded" to Yahoo Music Jukebox about five to six months ago when I reinstalled Windows. I just went to what I thought would be MusicMatch and found this Yahoo thing -- I thought it would be roughly the same, but it stinks. The constant badgering to upgrade to the premium service is hard to take. Sadly, iTunes stinks just as much in different ways.
It is pitch black. You are likely to be eaten by a grue.
Get the latest 2.x version you can find. Really lightweight and supports a lot of audio formats.
Later versions suck by comparison.
C - the footgun of programming languages
Anyone out there have a link to the last known "good" version? I haven't used it in a while and would like to get the penultimate uncrippled version. For the archives, yeah, that's it, the archives...
-- You are in a maze of little, twisty passages, all different... --
I stopped upgrading Musicmatch years ago by permanently blocking it from accessing the internet, back when I discovered the 'old' version ripped iTunes CD's and the 'new' didn't; it was a free no-choice-in-the-matter 'upgrade.' At that moment I learned my lesson and got off the upgrade train for all my applications unless and until I understood what was changing and why ahead of time.
Ibid.
"nothing not to like" ?!?!?! BULS&*@!
musicmatch was a big hairy craptacular piece of garbage.
The difference between Theory and Practice is greater in Practice than in Theory.
They shouldnt have to. There should always be a non-iTunes option otherwise they'll get like any monopoly, big, fat and complacent.
Anyways should we call 2007 'The Year of the Downgrade'. First Vista, now this... I hope this isnt the trend in the future...
09F911029D74E35BD84156C5635688C0
+2 Troll is Slashdot's way of saying groupthink is confused
Huh? This is a product made by for-profit entity. The sole purpose of it is to generate revenue. If the user is screwed in the process, well, no big deal.
Music match was a bloated piece of shit 4 years ago - I'd hate to see what new "features" were added in that time period!
Tags that are changed when MMJB is playing a song are not updated in the MP3 files themselves. The Library is updated, but not the files.
Versions before 9.0 had multiple libraries which I used extensively. MMJB 10.0 only has 1 library.
MMJB used to have skins that were well documented & easily changeable. No longer.
MMJB used to be a fairly lightweight audio player. MMJB has multiple background processes that must run on system startup.
These daemon processes are the cause on 90% of MMJB's crashes.
These daemon processes do not die easily causing slow reboots (you usually have to kill the processes off when after 30 seconds of inactivity windows notes that they didn't die when asked "nicely").
These daemon processes prevent external volumes like USB disks & keys from unmounting cleanly, so you have to kill them off by hand.
The one task that the deamon processes are supposed to be useful for from a users point of view (noticing that I renamed/moved files in my MP3 collection using the windows explorer so that MMJB will update the library) does not work reliably. I still have to go in & fix the library by hand.
The Jukebox + features like super tagging that I bought so that I could easily relabel my collection have stopped working because yahoo has turned off the web servers that they rely on.
I have a "lifetime" MMJB+ license without any of the DRM'ed "On Demand" features. I tried the Yahoo client and agree with BanjoBob that for me at least, is worse than MMJB.
Democracy is a sheep and two wolves deciding what to have for lunch. Freedom is a well armed sheep contesting the issue
Yeah! MusicMatch does everything, but everything badly. Try Mozilla based, cross-platform Songbird http://www.songbirdnest.com/
Yahoo! == the Shit Midases.
I don't get it. How can a "free" upgrade cost money? Is there some loophole in trade law that allows this?
May the Maths Be with you!
I recently experienced the Musicmatch downgrade. As a result, I went out and collected Windows-based MP3 players. Here are my conclusions: 1. Musicmatch v10. - didn't work well with large MP3 libraries. The librarian program (MIM.EXE) had a nasty habit of hanging the whole system. Has my personal favorite music browsing interface, a tree with Artist/Album/Songs 2. iTunes v7.2 - only interface to the iTunes store, which is the best MP3 storefront I have found. Has a nasty habit of using 100% of system resources whenever it wants to. I dislike the browser interface. DRM'd to the max. I only use this to manage my iPod and buy music. 3. WinAmp v5.35 - heavily customizable, but I could never figure out how to implement my favored music browsing interface. Too damn many Windows. 4. MediaMonkey v2.5.5 - my new favorite player. Gives me the Music Explorer Tree. Fast. Let's me play music and playlists from my iPod, which even iTunes won't let me do. Reasonable ripping. 5. Windows Media Player v11 - Slick looking user interface. Lousy music browser. Also DRM'd to the max. A Microsoft product - need I say more? 6. Yahoo MusicMatch - Don't know the version because it pissed me off so much I deleted it from my computer. This player has the music player trifecta - DRM'd, slow, lousy interface. Oh yes, and it deluges you with annoying adds. Avoid this player like the plague. Bottomline - if they had just FIXED MusicMatch v10, I think it would have been the best of the lot. Instead, Yahoo replaced it with some crap they scraped off the sidewalk. I'm trapped with iTunes to manage my iPod, although I suspect that if I screw around with MediaMonkey it will do that, too. Use WinAmp if you like blinking lights and pretty pictures. Otherwise, MediaMonkey is the best of the lot.
Remember when a specially modified version of Musicmatch was the official software for the Windows version of the iPod?
Apple did that because the had no port of iTunes for Windows yet and so they bundled a special version of the Musicmatch software with their Windows iPods. I remember reviews of that time comparing Musicmatch with iTunes and at that point Musicmatch was actually halfway decent (still couldnt hold a candle to iTunes though).
Sadly, it all got downhill after that...
Except that itunes sucks.
I also purchased the full version of MMJB a few versions ago - I think it was version 8 - because I really liked it, much better than WinAmp or other (at the time) available alternatives. I even recommended it to family, and on my music-related website.
Version 9 had some nice new features, together with some added annoyances and nags. I was still sort of happy.
But then version 10 came out... and within weeks I'd uninstalled it and gone back to version 9 (I'm glad I keep copies of my downloaded install programs). Way too many bugs, much slower, many new added nags even in a paid version. And many of the real obvious bugs in version 9 were still present in version 10. Geez, guys, fix the product FIRST, and THEN add features!
But even dealing with version 9 was no longer quite so painless - I now knew that the problems in version 9 would never be fixed. And when we bought an iPod, and had to install iTunes, we never looked back... pretty soon both of our PCs were running iTunes, sharing music with our Roku SoundBridge and syncing our three iPods...
It was a real shame to watch such a decent product decay into such a sorry state.
--Brandon / Split Infinity Music
From the parent post of changed features I would suspect they either re-wrote the app, or replaced it and attempted to make it somewhat similar. Probably because they don't have the original crew to maintain the original code anymore. Happens too often.
"Enjoy what you're doing! If it becomes drudgery, you're doing it wrong!" - Jim Butterfield
- It installs a "helper" program as a service. I've got enough services running on my computer. Given how little control I have over my Windows box by default, I'd just as well not have another service running.
- I don't like the idea of buying individual songs. I'd rather let the artist speak his/her/their whole album to me at once. It seems a little obscene, a little violating to the artistic process to cherry-pick. And if I'd done so in the past, I would have missed some real gems. Yes, I also loathe top-40 radio.
- Garbage in my MP3s. Open the Info view of some MP3 file you've ripped from your own collection of CDs, tapes and (yes!) vinyl (like the Alt-3 view in WinAmp 2.8). Add a comment. Now manage that MP3 file in iTunes. Open the Info view again. What's all that hexadecimal goo in the Comment field!? Bad program. Bad, bad program. Leave user data as you found it!
Write me off as a curmudgeon but when I run an MP3 player, I expect something that launches, plays MP3s (and leaves their content alone) and quits nicely when it leaves. iTunes doth not answer the bell, methinks, and its music purchase model doesn't do it for me either.cheers...ank, curmudgeon, I!
Still hoping for Gentle Treatment...
I was frustrated by MMJB for quite a while, but I couldn't find another product that tagged my files as well. I finally gave up when the application would just crash on me at start-up. I have finally found my nirvana: MediaMonkey. I only use the free version and it does everything I want, including helping with renaming, creating folders based on ID3 info, searching for duplicates, adding album artwork, conversion from flac and other formats to MP3. I highly recommend it.
Yahoo shopping: Good comparison site with lots of smaller stores. Use in conjunction with Amazon.
My.Yahoo: As far as bandwidth-sucking front pages go, this one is pretty configurable.
Calendar.yahoo.com: A pretty good online calendaring app with outlook and palm sync, but a huge bonus is the phone-screen support.
Yahoo Games: A solid little group of online games, better because yahoo provides non-english versions for your friends overseas.
The ______ Agenda
Gamers remember The All-Seeing Eye, which for a time was the single best server browser on the market. It started out life as a shareware product and the owner eventually sold it to Yahoo, staying on for a time as the developer. Yahoo's support for the product waned, the developer moved on, and the product hasn't seen an update in years. Yahoo is good at buying out products and letting them die, it seems.
Schnapple
I have used MusicMatch since it's inception, and loved it. My friends all sword by WINAMP and others, but there was something about MusicMatch that was more appealing.
You COULD RIP CD's, download network stream music and save it to your Music Library so it will always be there, Play Radio of your Favorite Music Genre, and loads of other things.
Now, after "upgrading" here's what I get. Constant stream interruption from Yahoo, as they must check my "license". LESS music from the UNLIMITED listen area. Before you could find just about ANYONE, now, IF you find your favorite 60's band (shut up, it's already established that I'm old), you are lucky if there are more then 8 tracks for you to choose. Just this past evening (I'm suffering thru some insomnia) I was listening to the "Classic Rock" channel and no less then 4 times did the Stream stop because Yahoo was trying to check for a license. Apparently they were having trouble checking, because I was told the music stopped because they couldn't find a license for it. The instructions on the screen said I should DOWNGRADE my MusicMatch to 8.1 and use it instead.
I really was hopeful that since Yahoo took things over, they might actually improve the service; although it didn't need MUCH improvement. As it stands right now though, when September 1 comes (my due date for renewal) if things haven't changed, I'll be looking for a new music streaming source, suggestions friends?
MMJB got bad around the same time its original programmer 'accidentally' drowned in a lake. Look it up sometime. It was already bad at the time it came with the iPod (of course, that generation of iPod was also a POS and iTunes was and is no better).
You can call me curmudgeon #2 :o) I was about to whack out a comment that said nearly the exact thing! Thanks. Mod to +6...oh, wait...
"My immediate reaction is "WTF? What kind of moron doesn't make things 64-bit safe to begin with?" Linus
Music Match is a terrible piece of software. It has always been a terrible piece of software. The only reason I used it was the transfer of MP3s to some MP3 players that required it.
I would rather decode MP3s by hand than use Music Match.
WinAmp, even with its current bloat, is superior.
Windows Media Player, which I loathe, is superior.
I have seen nothing inferior to Music Match.
Heck, I would rather NOT listen to music than use Music Match.
If the choice is listening to music on Music Match or silence, I choose silence.
First of all, there's nothing inherently wrong with a process running in the background. Its the purpose of the process and its security, performance, and other factors that determine whether it is good or evil. In the case of the iTunes process, it listens for the connection of devices that communicate with iTunes and uses about 0% CPU time. Sounds fairly harmless to me. Do you also hate puppies and rainbows?
Well, maybe YOU don't like the idea of picking songs, so please, by all means feel free to continue listening to late 70s and early 80s prog rock epics in their entirety. However, the record companies are having a hard time SELLING full albums, hence the return to a singles model that was popular back in (yes!) the 50s. So in this case the market has spoken - mindless automatons who can't bend over to tie their own shoes without drooling all over themselves and listen to garbage top 40 radio don't buy full albums because even they are smart enough to realize that most of the album is crap and only has 1 or 2 good songs. So you listen to bands that have artistic merit. Good for you. Most people don't.
Garbage in your MP3s? Let's consider that iTunes adds functionality to your MP3s by letting you tack on much more information than WinAMP, including album artwork, playback position, expanded tags for TV show organization, different fields for display info and sort info, etc. WinAMP can't TOUCH the massive organizational capabilities of iTunes, which, when combined with Smart Playlists allows you to autogenerate complex playlists based on criteria in your tags, which, if you are as much of a music geek as you think you are, your tags are incredibly intricate and detailed, allowing for more flexibility in autogeneration.
Basically, no one is writing you off as a curmudgeon. We're writing you off as a pathetic, elitist snob who, just because you don't know anyone around your immediate vicinity that meets your standards of musical appreciation, thinks that you are the grand poobah of how music should be consumed and organized.
For the record, by the way, I'm willing to bet that my music library whips the shit out of yours. A lot of my tracks are tagged with information like what studio they were recorded at and on what day. I can autobuild a playlist based on WHAT STUDIO THE TRACK WAS RECORDED IN. Can WinAMP do that? Didn't think so.
No one cares, your arguments are shallow and not applicable on a large scale, and you aren't as cool as you think you are. Which is odd, because you shouldn't really consider yourself cool at all if you're posting on slashdot. and I do include myself in that.
There are lots of legitimate reasons to dislike iTunes. There have been a number of feature regressions since version 4 (e.g. placing of UI components giving more space to the store at the expense of my own music, broken album detection code, etc), and some serious miss-features (e.g. party shuffle doesn't work with shared playlists, and doesn't let you shuffle albums), but it sounds a bit like you are clutching at straws.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
I believe that "hexadecimal goo" in the comment field is where iTunes stores information about volume normalization. Unfortunately, they fail to give any warning that the program will destroy your comments. Really, that is pretty poor programming. Why couldn't they just stick that information in the iTunes database instead of in the file?
"Anyone who [rips a CD] is probably engaging in copyright infringement." - David O. Carson
since the mid 90s...in about 95 or so, it was a fairly light weight, well put together little audio program/ripper. That's at about version 3 or 4. After that the code bloat set in and it was inundated with unnecessary, system slowing features that ruined it for its original purpose (probably at the behest of big media, I'm sure). Winamp was arguably better all along, but I thought Musicmatch was easier to use until about 96 or so. C'est la vie.
Seven years ago, I remember using musicmatch and having serious issues with it. I guess it was ok, but I can't see someone saying 'whats not to like' about it, much in the same way there was nothing to like about quicktime or realplayer.
I HAD bought the LIFETIME upgrade YEARS ago on it..
Dude, you type like Shatner talks.
Musicmatch 6.0 or so was an awesome player. It tied media into a nice clean interface, gave options to rip CDs, managed your library, etc. Fantastic piece of software.
When Musicmatch 7 rolled around, it was obvious that it was turning into bloatware. The interface was getting bloated and cumbersome, and as I recall it went from annoying (would you like to upgrade?) to flat out nagware (do you want to buy album? Do you want to download music like this for $xx?, etc). Beyond that, I haven't touched the software because once it started sporting the Yahoo! banner I knew it was complete garbage.
So, in my search for a Windows based music player, I happened across musikCube. It's a music player with most of the features of MusicMatch, 100% free, BSD licensed, and even supports ogg vorbis. Here's the Sourceforge page.
Screw Musicmatch, Winamp, Windows Media Player. Give me musikCube!
There is no reasonable defense against an idiot with an agenda
:wq
It comes bundled on some PCs--my church PC had it--which automatically degrades it down to the level of slime in my eyes, regardless of whether or not it is a good product. It was quickly uninstalled.
I remember it didn't do "syncing" (i.e. differential) updates. When you wanted to add 1 song the entire library was re-copied to the ipod. I remember it took like 20-30 minutes to update my 15gb back then.
When iTunes for Windows came out I finally got why people loved the iPod. Just being able to add 1 song at a time was a miracle...
"I don't like the idea of buying individual songs. I'd rather let the artist speak his/her/their whole album to me at once. It seems a little obscene, a little violating to the artistic process to cherry-pick. And if I'd done so in the past, I would have missed some real gems. Yes, I also loathe top-40 radio."
I'm not sure how long it has been since you last visited the itunes store, but you can now purchase entire albums with one click. And for less money than it would cost you to buy each track individually @ 99 cents a pop.
Proprietary software is going backwards? It seems that about half the upgrades you hear about involve adding restrictions (DRM) or intentionally crippling the software (unless you buy Ultimate).
"Knowledge is the only instrument of production that is not subject to diminishing returns" -Journal of Political Econom
Then foobar2000 (http://www.foobar2000.org/) is probably the player for you. ...).
As a fellow media-players-should-simply-play-media-dammit curmudgeon, it ticks all the boxes. Its UI is extremely simplistic (by default - it can be customized to include things like album art etc), it has high quality playback, and a very small footprint.
It has very powerful tagging functionality (with even the possibility to script tagging operations you frequently use).
There are also many, many plugins available (to provide things like freedb-based tagging, last.fm scrobbling,
When all other methods of communication fail, try words.
Too many fingers in the pie, and people are polite instead of telling the truth and offending those who need to grow up and deal with the fact that they're not always right.
Marketing wants to make sure we channel users toward buying the upgrade, legal is concerned about having too powerful of an mp3 ripper, management wants to simplify it so our support costs are less... the product that was once a great idea ends up being a stripped-down, pointless version of itself.
The problem that causes this isn't unique to corporations. It's unique to large groups of humans where we are afraid to tell the truth for social consequences. I've seen it in volunteer groups, the F/OSS movement, even friend groups trying to pick a restaurant.
It is the Human Disease, and the only solution is to get over our personal pretenses and look at the task, not how we represent ourselves in it.
technical writing / development
So iTunes can sort your collection by the maiden name of the mother of the 3rd girlfriend of the drummer of the band?
Great!
... except sticking some human-unreadable crap in the comment tag is a big no-no, not just from aestethic point of view, but also from the most basic standpoint of sane software design. That is so because inserting hexadecimal goo into comments fields, and thus essentially destroying their contents and usefulness for human readers, is not an acceptable method of storing data, but a desperate kludge by someone who had no idea where to put the extraneous pile of bits. If an application must store the names of pet cats of the songs writer's landlords, it should do so either in a dedicated MP3 ID tag, or, better yet (since sanity will soon leave us when 152454th tag type is introduced to store the "favourite flower of the accountant of the producer of the album"), in a separate database linked to your files via MD5 checksums or what not as this does not damage/corrupt the MP3 files themselves from the point of use in other software/players or human readability.
If you're running windows, http://tinyurl.com/4a4a6, (if you're not, plenty of FOSS stuff on *nix).
Loads fast, works really well, and basic version is free.
But this is getting offtopic...
I actually met one of the MusicMatch engineers and I tell you, I've never felt so bad for a guy. They were so proud of their product when it was MusicMatch. Then Yahoo bought them out and overnight they were working at breakneck speed converting it to Yahoo's vision of the Yahoo Music Engine (as it was called then) to launch their Yahoo Music Unlimited service on. I guess somewhere in the rush a bad memory leak was introduced (along with a few smaller problems). I don't think they ever got around to fixing the leak because it was too deep rooted in the code. Instead, they jury rigged it to where it wouldn't kill Windows, just make the software itself slow as all get out. Basically, everytime they went to actually fix the software, Yahoo kept pushing more of their external changes. Now it's to the point where I'll be surprised if they ever fix it unless they just scrap what they have and start over.
I would like to say, however, as much as the software sucks the Yahoo! Music Unlimited service for $7 a month is the best $7 I spend each month. Less than the price of a cd and I'm actually surprised at some of the obscure stuff I find on it. If your tastes are more mainstream, you'll find everything you want minus Zepplin and a few other hard to contract acts.
Wise men say, "Forgiveness is divine, but never pay full price for late pizza."
IMHO Windows Media Player 11 is much better than iTunes at this point. It's responsive, good looking, downloads cover art from the web, rips and burns audio CDs with ease, and keeps good tabs on the additions/removals from my media library. I'll never be accused of being a Microsoft fan but this is one of their upgrades that went well. Really the only music organizer that I like as much is Amarok which isn't an option for my Vista machine.
What made MMJB great and continues to make it so is the ability to port in any music source in addition to the supper tagging etc. Yeas I have had issue with the MMJB on occassion but chalk that up to a slow machine and connection. It runs rock solid on my newer box.
In "Preferences" there is an option to choose your recording source which is gone in the Yahoo Juke-
-the cd/dvd drive
-sound card aux line input
-system mixer
This feature made it easy to port in the following-
-vinyl lps via the Aux In and sent from your audio system receiver etc.
-analog tape whether cassette or reel also via the Aux line in mixer
Or any audio device that outputs the industry standard "Line Level"
Basicallly if you have your pc near your home stereo, you would just patch the "tape outputs R & L" to your sound card Aux input and then any source that you listen to via your home stereo receiver (vinyl, cassette, reel) is easily port into MMJB allowing you to digitize and preserve
This has enabled me to convert all of my live band recordings on reel and cassette to digital and manage them with MMJB in addition to select vinyl cuts or even micro cassette demos.
An added bonus was using DFX to enhance the original recordings which worked well.
With the Yahoo juke, there is no porting in so I will now have to buy a desktop audio editing suite.
Why are you even ripping files in MP3 format? Seriously, it sucks ass. Use AAC. It's iTunes' native format, plus any "MP3" player worth its salt will support it as well (including Winamp). You also won't have any problems with comment fields.
Your other two arguments don't even make any sense. Why does it really matter if there's a process running in the background that uses 200 kB of RAM and 0% of your CPU time? Did it kill your puppy? And if buying single songs offends you that much -- ok, just click the button to buy the entire album! Or don't use the iTunes music store at all. Nobody's forcing you to, if having the option of buying individual songs offends you that much.
Have you ever considered the possibility that it's WinAmp, not iTunes, that is b0rking the metadata?
Personally, I don't know the answer, but just assuming that it's iTunes seems an awful lot like jumping to conclusions to me.
Before you rant and rave about how iTunes is destroying your metadata, why don't you try taking a look at the same tagged MP3 in a few other players? You should also put the same tags on in those other players, then open it in iTunes, and in WinAmp. That should tell you who the real culprit is.
If it's iTunes, then you were right, and can rant and rave all you want (or, better, tell Apple about it and ask them to fix it). If it's WinAmp, then shut up and quit complaining about things you don't know anything about.
Dan Aris
Fun. Free. Online. RPG. BattleMaster.
PUPPIES?!? PUPPIES?!! Don't talk to me about puppies, I'm nearly incoherent with rage that you even bought the subject up. RAINBOWS!!!!???? You insensitive clod!
I know you fuckers are going crusify me for this but why not just use windows media player if your going to use shit? I'm one of the dumb fucks that paid for the life time upgrade on musicmatch and I just didn't get screwed, I got fucked up the ass with a pole. You see, I paid 70 fucking bucks for 10.0, damn my ass hurts. Okay, enough rambling, but windows media player is pig and is put out by the antichrist all right but once you get over that, its not really half bad. I mean once you kick that urge shit to the curb it does play mp3 rather nice, it burns cd's from mp3, and it even loads my ancent nomad with no problems. It's not really that bad a program.
Supporting World Peace Through Nuclear Pacification
I have been an Audible customer for just about as long as the service has been available. I have never had an "approved" player because the list of supported players was horrible at first and then because I just got used to my player and like the way it operates. I have always just downloaded the book in the audible manager software and then converted it to standard MP3 with Goldwave. Fast forward several years. A few months ago I had some issues getting a book to download properly. It would download but always start about 40 minutes into the book. I called customer support and was asked to "upgrade" to the newest Audible download manager. You guessed it...the new software would no longer allow Goldwave to convert the files. I searhed the web for the old software and re-installed it. I also sent a note to Audible letting them know that, should the old sofware quit working, I would no longer be a customer. Many of these corporate software upgrades appear to be limiting our use of the products we have purchased from those same corporations. Total crap! Sexton
Yahoo is in deep shit. Instead of clawing their way out with vision, ingenuity and leadership they are using every advantage they have to pry money from me. Google is giving things away and buying comapnies, adding still tremendous value Yahoo is charging for everything now, and isn't adding any more value whatsoever They are obviously in termoil, I predict a mass exodous of talent from Yahoo if it hasn't happened already Why doesn't Google just buy Yahoo?
I'm calling B.S. that is costs $20 for the upgrade. I owned MusicMatch since early 2000 something. I ended up costing me nothing to get the upgrade to Yahoo Music. The only problem I have with it right now is that it's sort of a resource hog.
...used to be my favorite store front end. Reasonably fast, nice user interface. Good sorting of my music and Yahoo's. Then it got fuxored and became jukebox or some shit and that's when it began pestering me to buy crap when I WAS ALREADY PAYING for Y! Music Unlimited. The endless stream of mandatory updates that made it slower, less functional, more naggy and more crash prone really turned me off. Way to take Y! Music Unlimited which I chose over Napster and Rhapsody as my MS Windows music store for the reasons mentioned above and fuck it all up, Yahoo.
I'm affraid there's no doubt about iTunes being the culprit, apple opted for storing it's own extended info in I believe the comment Tag of id3v2 by using a propriety string format that can only be parsed if you know what the hell it's supposed to say in what order.
Since I am stuck in the world of Windows at work I still use MusicMatch - or did - now it is Yahoo! Music Jukebox. I have over 550 albums (yes, I actually own them all, back off RIAA) and I have had no problem listening to any of them. I went to copy my latest purchase and was pleasantly surprised to see Ogg as an option. Unfortunately the Ogg file is about 5 times bigger than my mp3pro files so that is not a great option for work. My gut reaction was a little bit of revulsion, some concern that maybe I just made the wrong choice, and some general confusion. After digging through the controls and options for 10 to 15 minutes I discovered that most everything I loved about MMJB was in YMJ. To make me feel better about the decision I quickly learned that the selections on Yahoo! Unlimited were greater and that I could find more obscure albums or acts than I ever could on MMJB. The tagging has been enhanced too allowing me to tag my existing tracks as well as the ones I stream from Unlimited. I honestly have not tried all the features yet, but the ones I most frequently used, once I got used to the new interface, have made the transition successfully and at least for now I'm even happier with the results.
It's Yahoo! behind Delicious, and delicious is very useful (at least to me!).
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Del.icio.us
Animoog.org
WinAmp does not write anything to the tags unless you specifically edit one. I use WinAmp pretty much exclusively now, and can guarantee (at least on my computer) this is the case.
iTunes does add garbage to the tag. One more reason I don't use it. The biggest reason was more to do with it bing slow and a memory hog on my computer. Even after disabling the "helper" service (I know all it does is listen for iPods, but why leave it running if I don't use an iPod?)
Why bother harassing Apple to fix it? I just won't use it.
I have a hard time liking most media players. iTunes, MMJB, WMP, Real, Quicktime, etc. I love how realplayer and quicktime change all your file type associations, even when you specifically uncheck those options. Even better, I love how WMP will start to retag and reorganize your media library without asking. iTunes and MM aren't that bad, but they are slow and bloated.
Winamp is not perfect, but it's what I generally keep because it's small and fast, and doesn't retag/rename/reorganize my files without permission, and doesn't eat up my resources.
Thanks for noticing. As a former MM employee I can only thank Yahoo! for doing nothing for MM since the acquisition. I cannot recommend that anybody reading this allow Yahoo! to purchase your company. You may walk away rich, but the company you kept will become bankrupt.
MMJB was a product of devotion and effort among it's employees. The product wasn't perfect, but that wasn't because everyone didn't want it to be, more because we needed to get it out the door to satisfy some requirement or another. At the time of the purchase, everyone was looking forward to the resources that Yahoo! could bring to the table. What we discovered afterwards was mismanagement, corruption, and incompetence among those running the show. The news that they are discontinuing MMJB is no real surprise to me, as everyone realizes that YMJ is in no condition to be considered an upgrade path, and the afore mentioned incompetence would lead to a decision like this.
This may be the final nail in the coffin, but trust me folks, this was a long time coming. I would encourage a user revolt, but I don't think anyone would care enough to notice.
It does not matter which application does it, I am merely pointing out that it is a bad idea.
You are seriously projecting some sort of personal, music archiving application related (of all things), insecurity onto me here.
I do not use neither WinAMP or iTunes and I have no personal stake in any feud regarding music managment applications. My comments deal explicitely with the bad coding style of any application which attempts to store any sort of data in a binary format inside human readable user's comment field. Music and MP3 tags are just a specific example.
I first downloaded Ultra Player many years back when I saw what a CPU-pig Media Player was. It loads into 8MB of RAM and with my 400 song favorites list is using 13MB (on a 1GB RAM XP system). It continues to be free of nags and cost.
I come here for the love
My apologies, then: I interpreted your comment as a criticism of a feature of iTunes, which you do not use, versus WinAmp, which you do. Since that is apparently not the case, my entire post is moot :-)
Dan Aris
Fun. Free. Online. RPG. BattleMaster.
How about how intrusive it was and put garbage all over the place and tried to take over from other apps? How about the horrible rip quality (no error detection/correction like EAC) and the terribly outdated and flawed MP3 conversion algorithms and no Ogg support, at least in the version I tried.
MusicMatch Jukebox has been a bloated, annoying piece of nagware since it was created. I don't see how this is news.
Also, yahoo has been a big fan of forcing these "upgrades" on people since Yahoo messenger was in about version 4.5.
After that it got shittier and shittier but they keep forcing people to "upgrade" and will tell them all sorts of lies to get them to allow it.
Older versions used to allow you to choose not to upgrade. Not so with anything about 6.0 onward. Makes me want to go visit OldVersion again.
Question everything
... that whenever I talk to doctrinaire iTunes/iPod users, the existence of the store is one of the first five topics that come up. I was simply trying to say, that the existence of the store wasn't a selling point for me.
:)
(: And I did invite all and sundry to write me off as a curmudgeon...
cheers...ank
Still hoping for Gentle Treatment...
You must have been the guy who wrote it, because MusicMatch is AWFUL.
I got my iPod before iTunes was available on the PC, and this is what I had to use instead. It was horribly clunky and slow. iTunes for all it's problems is 100 times better.
"I have issues with most software players because they take Artist as some God-given way to sort, but between compilations, soundtracks/cast recordings, and one-off downloads, my artist list is so long it's practically unusable."
That's an excellent way to put it. And when you use your Ipod in the car, it makes the iPod unusable.
iTunes itself offers different ways of grouping songs than simple artist or album, but the iPod is pretty limited in that respect.
You were mistaken. Which is odd, since memory shouldn't be a problem for you
I have carefully refused all attempts to get me to "upgrade". Nevertheless, the thing that ticks me off is the setting in the program's preferences that sets the frequency the program waits before phoning home to check for updates and new versions. I have had that set to NEVER for over 2 years but it didn't stop the notices that Yahoo was taking over MM Jukebox.
Some freaking ethics. You tell it not to phone home and it does it anyway. I guess it has been doing so all along. That setting is more like a 'severity' level for displaying their spammy drek.
And don't kid yourself, there's plenty not to like about MM Jukebox, although most of my complaints center on the user interface and the way they scatter secret "upgrade now" menu items and buttons all over the place.
A pox on Yahoo's house. Now that MM Jukebox has been discontinues I think I'll reverse-engineer a key for it. No use being bothered to register a program that can no longer be registered.
Those that bought the lifetime upgrades can forget any sympathy from Yahoo.
I contacted them a number of times and, true to Yahoo's service, I never receive a reply.
Personally, I loved MusicMatch - though it was a resource hog, it worked very well for what I needed. And despite the warnings, it does actually work on Vista (if you're one of the unfortunate people to have bought Vista).
Yahoo's "replacement" product is nothing but a marketing machine. It sucks, period. Don't use it.
There must be a viable replacement out there somewhere, hopefully.
I don't know how iTunes does it, but ID3v2 allows for arbitrary tag data. You just give your tag section an identifier, and you can fill it with anything you want. Programs that don't recognise the identifier just ignore the data in that section.
If the iTunes helper service only watches for iPods being connected and disconnected, then I'm being needlessly paranoid. But my paranoia is well-earned with all the other things a Windoze box does and does not do.
I've never been called an elitist snob about my music, though. That is a new one. I'm actually quite accepting and exploratory of other musical styles. In fact, my musical tastes are more youthful than those of my kids -- drives them crazy: I have more to talk about on new music with their friends than they do. As far as I'm concerned, almost anything is worth at least one listen.
As for your organizational criteria with iTunes, it sounds like what you really need is a custom SQL database. I will be glad to craft such a thing for you at an hourly rate to be determined. Oh forgive me, I'm teasing.
Me cool? pshaw... I'm a 44 year old geek, married once (19 years and counting), father of three sons, long-term bus rider and ex-member of five failed carpools. Any pretensions I had to believing myself "cool" disappeared around the time I tipped the scales past 14 stone. All I wanted (in this sphere of interest) was some way of easily digitizing my music and playing it without having the files messed with. iTunes didn't do it for me, so if people are being encouraged to upgrade to it from what sounds like loathly things happening to MusicMatch, I thought it worth a couple of minutes to put my oar in and rebut.
I will say, thought, that I've been amused at the selection of responses my post garnered. I'll be chuckling well into next week at this rate.
cheers...ank
Still hoping for Gentle Treatment...
My old buddies at Philips tech support must be thrilled. Whilst their newer players all use MTP to copy tracks via Windows Media Player, the older models (apart from one or two drag 'n' droppers) are, IIRC, dependent on MusicMatch + drivers.
Great place to work, but I'm hella glad I won't have to deal with this =)
"There was nothing not to like about the product."
Gotta disagree with you there. I used it way back when, and it wasn't that great for anything except ripping MP3s from CDs, and in later versions that functionality was severely gimped.
Use Winamp, or foobar2000 if you're a power user.
This is a similar tale as what became of ASE. You'd think someone at Yahoo might start acting like they give a shit about the customers of the companies they buy. But apparently, they just slate these acquisitions for outright destruction, and for what? Maybe if we destroy enough good apps, the stock price will finally go up again? Has Master Control Program taken control over there?
Does anyone know of a good media player that has an alarm feature? I still use Musicmatch because I can wake up to whatever I want to hear in the morning (and loudly). Thanks