Okay, I have to admit I've responded to you elsewhere with a little vitriol since you had said you tried an iPod and seemed to be ignoring the features of iTunes that made it superior to the old method of manual folder management. But in this comment you reveal that you haven't really used an iPod with iTunes for any useful period of time, so you honestly don't know what you're missing.
There are multiple ways you can set up iTunes to copy music to your iPod:
1.) By default it tries to copy everything in your library, and if you don't have enough space on your iPod, iTunes tells you it will copy as much as it can. If you've got a small music collection, you can even use the checkmarks beside each song name and have iTunes only copy the checked music.
2.) Manually dragging music from the library to the mounted iPod icon in iTunes. This is similar to what you do now with your manual copying, though it's still simpler since you don't have to navigate a vast folder hierarchy of music (shudder...memories of my old music collection before iTunes came out).
3.) The obvious solution and the one most people use is create a playlist and tell iTunes to copy whatever is in the playlist to your iPod. You can have a manual playlist where you simply drag music to it that you want to hear, and next time you plug in, iTunes will copy it automatically. Or, you can create a Smart Playlist, and now your iPod will have music based on the algorithms and conditions you set in the Smart Playlist (it sounded like something I would never use either...until I tried it and loved it). You can have multiple playlists and check off the ones you want iTunes to keep automatically synced.
So the answer to your question of how iTunes knows what to copy over is that you tell it exactly what you want, so that you don't have to worry about it ever again. When I get a cool new album, I just drag it over to my "iPod music" playlist. Next time I plug in my iPod, the album will be synced, and I'm outta there.
This control extends to everything iPods can play/display--videos, photos, and podcasts. You can tell iTunes exactly what you want it to be copying. I have a photo album of my friends' pictures that iTunes also keeps synced.
It's time you read the guides at iLounge and read about how people use iTunes. The whole hipness/cool factor of iPod/iTunes is just icing on the cake.
Magical solution: So don't fuck around with playlists and ratings.
You still can't beat the jukebox interface that makes using a filesystem to organize thousands of songs look ridiculous in comparison, or the auto-syncing features. I make iTunes transfer my most recently added music, so whenever I want something new, I simply plug in, wait 30 seconds, and go on my way.
The whole concept of smart playlists and these "content managers" just seems stupid to me. I dont have the time to rate my music, just like I dont have the time to tag my images or other documents. The time I spend on tagging is far more than I would ever save on searching.
You don't need to do tagging to use iTunes, although it's silly to claim you don't have time to rate music when you're already spending time listening to the music. It takes like three clicks on an iPod to rate something.
What seems stupid to me is living in a world where managing thousands of files in a folder hierarchy is somehow better than a program that makes such a scheme obsolete. If I want to listen to Tool, I just type "too," and everything's already there. No more endless double-clicking.
I use folders to organize my songs, and transfering them to the Rave is as easy as plugging it in and dragging and dropping from Windows Explorer
Funny, I have my computer do work for me, since that's what it was designed to do. I have no need to "use folders to organize my songs" because iTunes has rendered the folder 100% obsolete. Clicking through a filesystem to organize music in the year 2006 is hilarious. Not only does it take three times as long, but you lose the metadata capabilities, Smart Playlist features, and instant interface of having everything right in front of you and being able to type the first four characters of a band's name to instantly have them appear right in front of you.
Transferring to my iPod is as easy as plugging it in. It auto-syncs according to my predetermined conditions. You have to manually drag and drop for yours.
I have a feeling you've never tried an iPod with iTunes for a week. You'd never go back, because it's a superior product.
There's no way you'd be able to drag and drop files into random scattered folders faster than it takes someone to set a star rating on an iPod. In iTunes, I'd be able to go from album to album before you'd be done closing your windows to go to the next album.
Yeah, I like all the music on my player, too, but I like some more than others, and a few are top-notch five-star classics. I can use Smart Playlists to randomly pull out the best of the best, or I can make playlists to grab some of my lesser played songs and give them a try.
You're just living behind the times. Organizing via folders and playlists? I get the feeling you're one of those freakish "I have to organize every single song on the filesystem because I don't trust automatic organizers like iTunes" even though iTunes not only automatically creates those folders for you based on parameters you determine, it renders folders obsolete anyway. That's the most important feature of a jukebox player. Clicking through a filesystem like I used to do in my Winamp days seems so hilarious in retrospect. When I can just type the first few characters of a band in the search field and get what I want in 2 seconds.
Dude, you've already posted in this story (and other Apple stories); we get it, you hate Apple and the iPod. You're a teeny, tiny minority with a chip on your shoulder.
The lack of 64-bit GUI frameworks is a valid point. OS X supports 64-bit, but you have to spawn the 64-bit process in the background as a console process and communicate with it in your GUI, since the windowing libraries are currently not 64-bit. Hopefully, we'll see that change in OS X Leopard.
First of all, it is not "crippled" to disable "certain core UNIX functionality" for Apple's DRM "apps" (there's only one, and it's iTunes). Second, it's called P_DENY_ATTACH, fully documented in the ptrace man page, which allows a process to avoid being debugged. Third, this flag isn't set in the OS X kernel, it's set in the application. Fourth, Darwin is open source, so you only have to remove the if statement in ptrace().
It was cute the way you tried to use scared words like "deliberately crippled" and "core UNIX functionality" without actually giving details, though. Next time, get a little informed before passing along what someone told you was true on the Internet.
What do you mean, "all that" DRM yumminess? The only DRM is if you buy something from the iTunes Store, and even so it's still the most liberal DRM out there.
Re:Why do people care about this guy? (serious inq
on
Woz On Apple's Success
·
· Score: 1
You wouldn't be using UNIX on your personal computer if not for Apple. They're the reason you can go to a store and buy a desktop computer for your home.
Re:yep, great benchmarks, but lacking in features.
on
MacBook Pro Benchmarks
·
· Score: 1
Funny, people agree with you and mod you up and you're okay with it, people disagree with you and mod you down, and suddenly it's an Apple conspiracy. Get over it.
Uh, maybe in your twisted niche Slashdot world...for most people, the coolest thing about OS X is its interface and top-notch frameworks. Who gives a damn if the Darwin source is available? Have you ever actually needed or used it?
Slashdot posters have a tendency to think their concerns represent everybody's concerns. Kind of like how we always see "Does it play Ogg?" posted, when nobody actually cares about Ogg.
Calling OS X "Linux with a better UI" illustrates a profound ignorance of the OS X operating system, from the frameworks (Cocoa and its related APIs, the best application development framework bar none) to the core technologies like Mach and BSD. Ignoring its top features by dismissing it as a "proprietary system with candy coating" strikes me as counterproductively idealistic. If you feel pressure to switch, then switch! Whatever gets your job done better, and believe me, OS X gets the job done.
Not to mention that it's likely Apple just hasn't put the sources up yet in this situation. It took them a while to post the new Darwin sources, but they got them out. The only proprietary things in OS X are Aqua and related technologies.
Oh, boo-hoo for Microsoft. This is the company that all through the 90s forced OEMs into illegal bundling deals where said OEMs were punished for selling computers that had Microsoft alternatives installed--effectively preventing OS/2, BeOS, various DOS alternatives, and hundreds of other superior competitors from being able to compete in the first place. Yeah, karma's a bitch.
It doesn't make it obvious at all. Having seven or eight versions of Vista is not only incredibly confusing to consumers, it's downright hilarious reading all the long product names and realizing this is a company with a completely broken marketing department. Most everything in Vista is two or three words long now, prefixed with "Windows"--even the newly rebranded Windows Internet Explorer. Avalon, a cool name, was replaced with Windows Presentation Foundation. Hilarious.
Normally, there shouldn't be a problem, but Microsoft is now trying to compete with iTunes and other players and not simply provide a simple media player that plays container formats (the way Quicktime Player does), but try to shove the WMV/WMA format down everyone's throats.
Absolutely everything Microsoft does is to extend the monopoly platform, either through digital media to make everyone reliant on Windows or through console gaming (the X-Box wouldn't exist if Sony and Nintendo had ended up using Microsoft's APIs when they offered them) to make everyone reliant on...Windows. Everything is about tying you to Windows.
If WMP just played standard formats without trying to be a little bundled media center like iTunes, I'm not sure there would be as much of a problem. But I could be wrong. That's not even getting into the fact you can't uninstall the damn thing, unlike iTunes and Quicktime Player (even on a Mac). Hell, this is the company that forced an IM client on every startup and didn't give an interface to disable it or uninstall it. Just to tie people to MSN instead of AIM. Freakin' crazy.
Can I have yours? I'm just positive you get the chicks all day long...
Re:Why do people care about this guy? (serious inq
on
Woz On Apple's Success
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
Because he helped start the personal computer revolution that enabled you to be typing on your computer in your home or office to write that comment. And he brings technical authority, since the Apple II computer was the last personal computer to be designed entirely by a single human being. Whether you use Windows or Linux, it all traces back to Apple.
The controversy is that for IHVs to provide their own ICD requires internal knowledge of the Desktop Compositing system that Microsoft has apparently not provided to the level needed for proper support. Microsoft is taking full steps to eliminate OpenGL in Windows Vista, starting with pushing it aside as a second-class citizen. The goal is to put their Windows/DirectX APIs everywhere, which was the whole purpose of the X-Box to begin with (in other words, they don't give two shits about games; they just want to extend the Windows monopoly after seeing the rising success of the console market, and game quality be damned...so we get XBox360 commercials espousing the wonders of sweat on a basketball player instead of good gameplay).
I know it's super-awesome to use the old "^H" joke and make cracks at the "new administration" since Bush is always wrong here on Slashdot, but next time RTFA. This wasn't in America.
Even Google makes an effort to filter things out, such as child porn. Claiming indexing isn't the same as actually sharing it is like saying the guy driving the car that carried some burglars had nothing to do with their crimes. The indexing servers are there to directly facilitate piracy and connect users to other users.
How come when the property of regular citizens is siezed for investigation of a piracy or drug-related crime, you always hear the term "raid."
A raid is an ability the law provides for. Content creators have just as much rights to protection by the law as "regular citizens" do. It's silly to pretend the Razorback servers were being used for some grand, benign purpose. Everybody including the server owners knows what happens on the E2DK network.
Slashdot Mirror
Okay, I have to admit I've responded to you elsewhere with a little vitriol since you had said you tried an iPod and seemed to be ignoring the features of iTunes that made it superior to the old method of manual folder management. But in this comment you reveal that you haven't really used an iPod with iTunes for any useful period of time, so you honestly don't know what you're missing.
There are multiple ways you can set up iTunes to copy music to your iPod:
1.) By default it tries to copy everything in your library, and if you don't have enough space on your iPod, iTunes tells you it will copy as much as it can. If you've got a small music collection, you can even use the checkmarks beside each song name and have iTunes only copy the checked music.
2.) Manually dragging music from the library to the mounted iPod icon in iTunes. This is similar to what you do now with your manual copying, though it's still simpler since you don't have to navigate a vast folder hierarchy of music (shudder...memories of my old music collection before iTunes came out).
3.) The obvious solution and the one most people use is create a playlist and tell iTunes to copy whatever is in the playlist to your iPod. You can have a manual playlist where you simply drag music to it that you want to hear, and next time you plug in, iTunes will copy it automatically. Or, you can create a Smart Playlist, and now your iPod will have music based on the algorithms and conditions you set in the Smart Playlist (it sounded like something I would never use either...until I tried it and loved it). You can have multiple playlists and check off the ones you want iTunes to keep automatically synced.
So the answer to your question of how iTunes knows what to copy over is that you tell it exactly what you want, so that you don't have to worry about it ever again. When I get a cool new album, I just drag it over to my "iPod music" playlist. Next time I plug in my iPod, the album will be synced, and I'm outta there.
This control extends to everything iPods can play/display--videos, photos, and podcasts. You can tell iTunes exactly what you want it to be copying. I have a photo album of my friends' pictures that iTunes also keeps synced.
It's time you read the guides at iLounge and read about how people use iTunes. The whole hipness/cool factor of iPod/iTunes is just icing on the cake.
Magical solution: So don't fuck around with playlists and ratings.
You still can't beat the jukebox interface that makes using a filesystem to organize thousands of songs look ridiculous in comparison, or the auto-syncing features. I make iTunes transfer my most recently added music, so whenever I want something new, I simply plug in, wait 30 seconds, and go on my way.
The whole concept of smart playlists and these "content managers" just seems stupid to me. I dont have the time to rate my music, just like I dont have the time to tag my images or other documents. The time I spend on tagging is far more than I would ever save on searching.
You don't need to do tagging to use iTunes, although it's silly to claim you don't have time to rate music when you're already spending time listening to the music. It takes like three clicks on an iPod to rate something.
What seems stupid to me is living in a world where managing thousands of files in a folder hierarchy is somehow better than a program that makes such a scheme obsolete. If I want to listen to Tool, I just type "too," and everything's already there. No more endless double-clicking.
I use folders to organize my songs, and transfering them to the Rave is as easy as plugging it in and dragging and dropping from Windows Explorer
Funny, I have my computer do work for me, since that's what it was designed to do. I have no need to "use folders to organize my songs" because iTunes has rendered the folder 100% obsolete. Clicking through a filesystem to organize music in the year 2006 is hilarious. Not only does it take three times as long, but you lose the metadata capabilities, Smart Playlist features, and instant interface of having everything right in front of you and being able to type the first four characters of a band's name to instantly have them appear right in front of you.
Transferring to my iPod is as easy as plugging it in. It auto-syncs according to my predetermined conditions. You have to manually drag and drop for yours.
I have a feeling you've never tried an iPod with iTunes for a week. You'd never go back, because it's a superior product.
There's no way you'd be able to drag and drop files into random scattered folders faster than it takes someone to set a star rating on an iPod. In iTunes, I'd be able to go from album to album before you'd be done closing your windows to go to the next album.
Yeah, I like all the music on my player, too, but I like some more than others, and a few are top-notch five-star classics. I can use Smart Playlists to randomly pull out the best of the best, or I can make playlists to grab some of my lesser played songs and give them a try.
You're just living behind the times. Organizing via folders and playlists? I get the feeling you're one of those freakish "I have to organize every single song on the filesystem because I don't trust automatic organizers like iTunes" even though iTunes not only automatically creates those folders for you based on parameters you determine, it renders folders obsolete anyway. That's the most important feature of a jukebox player. Clicking through a filesystem like I used to do in my Winamp days seems so hilarious in retrospect. When I can just type the first few characters of a band in the search field and get what I want in 2 seconds.
Dude, you've already posted in this story (and other Apple stories); we get it, you hate Apple and the iPod. You're a teeny, tiny minority with a chip on your shoulder.
Okay, let's discuss what factors I use in determining whatever is needed:
1.) I look at what is needed.
2.) I use what fulfills those needs.
The lack of 64-bit GUI frameworks is a valid point. OS X supports 64-bit, but you have to spawn the 64-bit process in the background as a console process and communicate with it in your GUI, since the windowing libraries are currently not 64-bit. Hopefully, we'll see that change in OS X Leopard.
First of all, it is not "crippled" to disable "certain core UNIX functionality" for Apple's DRM "apps" (there's only one, and it's iTunes). Second, it's called P_DENY_ATTACH, fully documented in the ptrace man page, which allows a process to avoid being debugged. Third, this flag isn't set in the OS X kernel, it's set in the application. Fourth, Darwin is open source, so you only have to remove the if statement in ptrace().
It was cute the way you tried to use scared words like "deliberately crippled" and "core UNIX functionality" without actually giving details, though. Next time, get a little informed before passing along what someone told you was true on the Internet.
So the answer to the submission is "Whatever is needed." Another pointless article.
What do you mean, "all that" DRM yumminess? The only DRM is if you buy something from the iTunes Store, and even so it's still the most liberal DRM out there.
You wouldn't be using UNIX on your personal computer if not for Apple. They're the reason you can go to a store and buy a desktop computer for your home.
Funny, people agree with you and mod you up and you're okay with it, people disagree with you and mod you down, and suddenly it's an Apple conspiracy. Get over it.
See this comment. Apple made a quick mistake and fixed it, and the sources ARE available.
Next.
Uh, maybe in your twisted niche Slashdot world...for most people, the coolest thing about OS X is its interface and top-notch frameworks. Who gives a damn if the Darwin source is available? Have you ever actually needed or used it?
Slashdot posters have a tendency to think their concerns represent everybody's concerns. Kind of like how we always see "Does it play Ogg?" posted, when nobody actually cares about Ogg.
Calling OS X "Linux with a better UI" illustrates a profound ignorance of the OS X operating system, from the frameworks (Cocoa and its related APIs, the best application development framework bar none) to the core technologies like Mach and BSD. Ignoring its top features by dismissing it as a "proprietary system with candy coating" strikes me as counterproductively idealistic. If you feel pressure to switch, then switch! Whatever gets your job done better, and believe me, OS X gets the job done.
Not to mention that it's likely Apple just hasn't put the sources up yet in this situation. It took them a while to post the new Darwin sources, but they got them out. The only proprietary things in OS X are Aqua and related technologies.
Oh, boo-hoo for Microsoft. This is the company that all through the 90s forced OEMs into illegal bundling deals where said OEMs were punished for selling computers that had Microsoft alternatives installed--effectively preventing OS/2, BeOS, various DOS alternatives, and hundreds of other superior competitors from being able to compete in the first place. Yeah, karma's a bitch.
It doesn't make it obvious at all. Having seven or eight versions of Vista is not only incredibly confusing to consumers, it's downright hilarious reading all the long product names and realizing this is a company with a completely broken marketing department. Most everything in Vista is two or three words long now, prefixed with "Windows"--even the newly rebranded Windows Internet Explorer. Avalon, a cool name, was replaced with Windows Presentation Foundation. Hilarious.
Normally, there shouldn't be a problem, but Microsoft is now trying to compete with iTunes and other players and not simply provide a simple media player that plays container formats (the way Quicktime Player does), but try to shove the WMV/WMA format down everyone's throats.
Absolutely everything Microsoft does is to extend the monopoly platform, either through digital media to make everyone reliant on Windows or through console gaming (the X-Box wouldn't exist if Sony and Nintendo had ended up using Microsoft's APIs when they offered them) to make everyone reliant on...Windows. Everything is about tying you to Windows.
If WMP just played standard formats without trying to be a little bundled media center like iTunes, I'm not sure there would be as much of a problem. But I could be wrong. That's not even getting into the fact you can't uninstall the damn thing, unlike iTunes and Quicktime Player (even on a Mac). Hell, this is the company that forced an IM client on every startup and didn't give an interface to disable it or uninstall it. Just to tie people to MSN instead of AIM. Freakin' crazy.
Can I have yours? I'm just positive you get the chicks all day long...
Because he helped start the personal computer revolution that enabled you to be typing on your computer in your home or office to write that comment. And he brings technical authority, since the Apple II computer was the last personal computer to be designed entirely by a single human being. Whether you use Windows or Linux, it all traces back to Apple.
The controversy is that for IHVs to provide their own ICD requires internal knowledge of the Desktop Compositing system that Microsoft has apparently not provided to the level needed for proper support. Microsoft is taking full steps to eliminate OpenGL in Windows Vista, starting with pushing it aside as a second-class citizen. The goal is to put their Windows/DirectX APIs everywhere, which was the whole purpose of the X-Box to begin with (in other words, they don't give two shits about games; they just want to extend the Windows monopoly after seeing the rising success of the console market, and game quality be damned...so we get XBox360 commercials espousing the wonders of sweat on a basketball player instead of good gameplay).
I know it's super-awesome to use the old "^H" joke and make cracks at the "new administration" since Bush is always wrong here on Slashdot, but next time RTFA. This wasn't in America.
Even Google makes an effort to filter things out, such as child porn. Claiming indexing isn't the same as actually sharing it is like saying the guy driving the car that carried some burglars had nothing to do with their crimes. The indexing servers are there to directly facilitate piracy and connect users to other users.
How come when the property of regular citizens is siezed for investigation of a piracy or drug-related crime, you always hear the term "raid."
A raid is an ability the law provides for. Content creators have just as much rights to protection by the law as "regular citizens" do. It's silly to pretend the Razorback servers were being used for some grand, benign purpose. Everybody including the server owners knows what happens on the E2DK network.
You've GOT to be kidding. I know it goes against the geek hivemind to say it, but Nethack sucks. I've never played a more boring game.