Tuesday, September 7, 2010

The products of my decadent lifestyle are insufficiently pleasing

Warning: if you like album art, DO NOT "upgrade" to goddamn itunes 10. It's pissing me off so much. I'm very particular about my album art, and have expended a lot of effort getting the highest quality images I can possibly find for every one of the many hundreds of albums I have in itunes, and now the largest I can view them in the only navigation setting that works for my purposes is, well, tiny. Fuck you, Apple. This is by far the worst thing you've ever done.

8 comments:

Dog's New Clothes said...

Hmmm...

I have iTunes 10 and I'm still able to click on the album art and get the larger picture.

I'm quite particular about my album art too. Is there one place you go to get high-quality images? I think Amazon and Discogs are pretty good.

Ethan said...

I don't have any one place. I usually go to Rate Your Music first, which can be a bit of a crapshoot but when their images are good they're great. After that I just google.

List view is the only navigation I find useful, and in that even when you set the images to the largest possible size they're only about a third to a quarter the size I want them to be. I know you can click on the album art to open them in a separate window, but I want to be able to view my library with full size art. I know it sounds minor, but it's a huge loss of pleasure in the music experience for me.

Anonymous said...

Apple should be skull-thwacked for crushing Lala.

Ethan said...

Yeah, that too. Ugh.

stras said...

iTunes is grotesquely buggy enough that I instinctively stopped upgrading a long time ago; the logic of monopoly power in the software industry ensures that after a certain point, versions of certain popular products will become increasingly horrible with no relief in sight.

Randal Graves said...

I had iTunes issues at around 8.0, so I went back to the crappy Windows Media Player, which, though indeed crappy, has that cosmic Now Playing 70s video effect.

almostinfamous said...

i stopped using my ipod for music after they said it would cost me as much as buying a new player to replace the headphone socket. that was in 2007. now it's just a glorified 30GB HDD...

you should look into installing rockbox if it's possible (not for the faint of heart - and it's easily available through teh google)

Ethan said...

Y'all--I think about giving up itunes pretty frequently, but nothing I've come across easily works well with mac in the way I want it. For all its shittiness, itunes has a really powerful metadata editor that lets me organize my music exactly how I want it, and it also keeps the files really neat without me even trying, and I'd hate to give that out.

almostinfamous--too tired at the moment to look into rockbox in much depth, but it looks like it's mostly for managing ipods? I don't use an ipod or actually any portable mp3 player. But my computer is the primary home of my music (it's that and records, I eliminated CDs about a year ago, which was a great decision for me), and if I can't keep it how I want, I get very sad.