OS X

Affected · Feh Fighter Joined: 23 May 2003 Posts: 496

Sheesh. I recently got a pretty nice mac workstation, mainly because with the software load-out I got the hardware basically paid for itself compared to getting a pc. (Shake @ 500 euro for the mac vs. 5000 or so for Linux...)

So, it's not bad, mostly, but there sure are some annoying things. I fixed the mouse acceleration issues (I hate that, and by default you can't turn it off) by installing USB Overdrive, also ditched the mighty mouse immediately in favour of my more ergonomic Logitech. The biggest hurdle so far has been organizing music files. I have a network share with all my media on it, and I've used Amarok or Mediamonkey to keep the file structures in my mp3 folder organized by checking the tags on any new files I get and then sorting the files to the appropriate folders based on the tags. On OS X, though, it turns out finding an app to do that is not as easy as you'd think...

iTunes does, sort of, sort files, but it won't let you specify how. Songbird seems nice, but lacks file management features as well as some other stuff. So, I was thinking I'd use Songbird to play files and iTunes to sort the files into the correct directory/filename structure in a temp directory, then copy the directories manually over to my mp3 share. Disaster narrowly averted...

I was about to copy a directory structure of type Artist/Album/track#-title.mp3 from the temp dir to the mp3 dir when I remebered how we lost a few days' work at the office a month or so ago: In OS X, if you copy folder X over another folder by the same name, instead of merging the contents, the OS basically just deletes the folder being overwritten and then copies the new folder over.

Christ on a bike! Sure it warns that contents will be replaced, but it could be a tad more specific vis-a-vis the potential for destruction.

Well, anyway, I realized MusicIP mixer is available for OSX, and it does file organization, so I guess I'm good for now. Still. Shit.

KDan · Posted: Fri Jun 06, 2008 3:50 am Post subject:

You need a tool to auto-organise your music??

/me glances are neatly organised 400 GB of music on his hard drive.

I'm afraid I don't have that problem.

I organise my music on my hard drive. When I want a particular file, I know exactly where to find it. I then use Cog as a winamp-like player, because iTunes is just a pain in the ass to use with large collections anyway. And it doesn't play FLAC.

Daniel
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Dan says:
how do you like os x?
wayfarer says:
how do you like sex?
wayfarer says:
same thing

Affected · Feh Fighter Joined: 23 May 2003 Posts: 496

I don't *need* a tool. It's less bothersome when you don't have to manually rename files, though. My scheme is basically /artist/album/track# - title.ext , and whatever I have that I don't yet know well enough to have a basic mental image of what the music is like, I place in a separate folder so I can get to know the stuff better. I find a library player is pretty nice in the end, when it's a good one and not crap like iTunes. I still keep things tidy on my media share, but I prefer the interface Amarok, for example, offers to browse through music to going through the directories. The main thing is the ability to organize the files via the player, though.

ThatEagle · Posted: Tue Jun 10, 2008 9:34 pm Post subject:

Same here. I *would* like to organize them this way, but I didn't bother to search for a good software (better than itunes) to do that for me.

Using Itunes... mainly for the rating system (you can play only 5 star songs for example) and the automatic folder ordering.

What I hate is its bad management of duplicates, and the fact there is no way to keep your ratings if you move your folders around. (So you have to copy your music into the itunes folder and leave them there.)

Kdan: 400Gb of music. You probably need a lifetime to listen to every song in there... maybe even come back into a future reincarnation to finish listening.
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Just because you're paranoid doesn't mean they're not out to get you.

KDan · Posted: Thu Jun 12, 2008 6:43 am Post subject:

Not really. Half of it is FLAC, so this works out to:

200 Gb FLAC => 50'000 minutes of music

200 Gb MP3 => 200'000 minutes of music

=> 250k minutes

=> 4166 hours

Accumulated over about 10 years, so that's only 400 hours of new music listening per year, i.e. about 1 hour of new music per day on average. Seems quite reasonable. Bear in mind I also work from home these days and I listen to music pretty much continuously all day. Even these 400 GB get old fairly quickly. Also bear in mind that a lot of my new music comes in multi-hour chunks (like live sets or double-CD mixes, and classical music which I tend to get in "complete" chunks and listen to in that way too (e.g. if I'm listening to Mozart, I'll probably queue up all of the Divertimenti at once rather than once CD at a time)).

Daniel
_________________
Dan says:
how do you like os x?
wayfarer says:
how do you like sex?
wayfarer says:
same thing

KDan · Posted: Thu Jun 12, 2008 9:53 am Post subject:

I'll add that while there's certainly some bits of my collection I haven't ever listened to, I'd wager that's probably less than 10%, and certainly less than 20%, and there's certainly a sizeable (10-20%) of that collection that I've listened to many, many times.

Daniel
_________________
Dan says:
how do you like os x?
wayfarer says:
how do you like sex?
wayfarer says:
same thing