S’pose I can look at foobar2000…

BTW, subsets work just fine in a jukebox system if you take the time to tag your collection and select by tags. Though, frankly, I _like_ shuffling the complete collection in most situations — music for driving would be the major exception, and the other is that I still want to see a system clever enough to realize that if it plays an intro track it should usually (but not necessarily always?) follow that with the song it introduced rather than taking another random jump.

Eset is also picking up a potential threat Zugo-silent.exe some sort of toolbar which I unchecked so it shouldn’t be trying to install.

Is only one other person having this problem?

Win7 Ultimate 64bit sytsem

John

foobar2000 is everything iTunes isn’t – i.e. user-configurable. You can configure track groupings, sort by complex formulas (I have it by album artist, sorted chronologically by album within), configure keyboard shortcuts for absolutely everything, watch multiple folders on local or network drives – it compiles a tag database from whatever locations you set as the Library, leaving the folder configuration up to the user.
There are plugins for waveform seekbar (think Soundcloud’s interface), more advanced playlist viewers, faceted search interfaces, native last.fm submission…

And best of all is the inbuild mass-tagger, so much better than the disaster that is iTunes’ tagging – tag common fields at once, easily enter different track titles (etc) or even auto-tag based on filename patterns. Add whatever additional tags you want to your files, and use those to sort or search as well.
And with Discogs and Musicbrainz components, retrieve far better info than Gracenote’s limited database.
Plus you can keep the artwork in a file in your album’s directory, or embed it if you insist – far more easily than iTunes’ clunky time-consuming method (unless all your music is in iTunes/Gracenote).

The iPod component (foo_dop) can write to all iDevices including iPad 2 (with a couple of additional dlls) and lets you assign tag patterns to iTunes fields, so I have all album titles on my iPod prefixed with [YYYY] so they’re properly sorted chronologically, and I have all multi-artist albums appear in compilations (because Apple merrily ignores the Album Artist tag).

And of course it’s compatible with LAME for CD ripping/file conversion and for tagging for gapless playback. No need to waste your time analysing the files after the fact iTunes-style.

It’s not for everyone, because it takes some work, and because it’s Windows-only. It works, mostly, in Wine, but there are enough niggling things that I actually bother to run WinXP in VMware on my Mac, just to use it :) Best of both worlds!
(but I wish there was a decent alternative for Mac)

The best interface would let me type, and as I typed it would show album, artist, and song titles that match what I have typed so far. At any point I can hit one key to play the first entry in my results, or the only entry in my results.

Ok, I’m confused. Have you actually used iTunes? It does that exactly and has so for a very long time now.

(At least on my Mac it does, I haven’t tested it with Windows)

I use squeezeserver, various software players (SoftSqueeze actually tunnels over SSH!) and a couple of hardware squeezeboxes to play my collection of over 5,000 FLAC files painlessly. I like the interfaces much better than iTunes.

Most of my music was ripped from CDs that were purchased directly from artists or given to me by artists. I use EasyTag to extensively tag the FLACs when I rip them, and I pull the album art from the Internet at the same time if it’s available, otherwise I scan it in from the CD with a Canon PIXMA (and tweak it as necessary in the GiMP) or get the artist to email me a scan of the original art. It took about two weeks, more or less, to rip my entire collection of CDs to FLAC. I did it in the evenings while washing dishes and doing other interruptable household chores. I plan to also to digitize my irreplaceable tapes and vinyl soon!

I hope Miro continues to improve; it has the potential to be one of the best players evar. Remember how long it took to get from Netscape to Firefox? These things take some time, if you actually care about doing it right.

Will definitely be giving it a try.

I dont understand why people would want to sync their media up anyway…. For me, I have way too much media – my music alone would fill the largest available ipod. Syncing merely sets the stage for people to ridicule the terrible crap that ends up playing when you set it to shuffle.

Thankfully these alternatives are being created, but I am reluctant to install because:
1) I installed Miro when ver 2.0 was posted on BB in 2009
and I found it was not so useful for me. What does it do that utorrent, Windows Explorer & VLC cant?
2) I never use or need itunes (except for when my gf asks for help with the ipod that I gave her and sadly itunes cannot be replaced by Miro for the purposes of updating the OS)
3) I bought a device that respects my freedom as the device owner. Drag and drop + Insstall anything without rooting the device? Yes please.

Does Miro allow for tagging music with keywords? That’s the main thing I think is missing from iTunes in terms of getting a handle on thousands and thousands of songs from different genres, moods, etc. Apple’s solution was a trojan horse: show us all your music data, and we’ll analyze it for you (and use it for whatever else we want). But imagine if you could make a dynamic playlist based on, “all music in the genre ‘Indie Rock’, with tags: ‘breakup’, ‘whiskey’, ‘acoustic’”. Yes, you’d have to tag everything yourself, but that’s a lot better than giving up your privacy.

Thanks a lot guys.

https://develop.participatoryculture.org/index.php/DeviceSupport/SupportedDevices

The question becomes – If this is only for non-apple devices then why the fuck weere you using itunes to begin with!?

Most excellent, and how it tickles me that you are involved in it.

Boing Ho! (You know like Tally Ho) my man!

But if Ed is right and the interface is like iTunes, I totally see why they did it, but it is a very clumsy interface and don’t even get me going on iTunes stores useless search process….Oy!

I liked Miro on Facebook, but decided not to send $5 because of these skeezy tricks.