[TiggoBitties]

50MB? That's nothing... i'm at 50GB.

[TxTom]

If for nothing more than the performance boost, thanks Apple!

[rynosoft]

Context, unless I misunderstand you, that is precisely what iTunes DJ (and Party Shuffle before it) does. That's why I use it.

[rynosoft]

bq. You have some music playing, you fancy the next track to be 'such and such' so in my mind clicking it or hold clicking it should stack it up ready to be played next.

Yes, you can do that with Party Shuffle/iTunes DJ. Ctrl-click (or right-click) on the song (or selected songs) and choose "Play Next in iTunes DJ".

[trip1ex]

[quote name='context']
>

stilist said:

> >> ITunes sorts and organizes fine. It seems like some complaints are more about it not using the system file structure to sort and organize.
> >
> > How many song files does iTunes organize and sort for you? How many subfolders do you have in your iTunes music folder? Don't you think that iTunes should offer some options -- like organizing the song files by genre subfolders in the Music folder -- which don't necessitate having 1,400 subfolders (and growing) in the Music folder? The iTunes teams seems to have always had a problem with the concept of hierarchy.{quote}
>
> For several years, I managed my library's structure by hand. Somewhere around 10,000 items, I admitted to myself that I had lost control over my system--so I switched over to letting iTunes manage everything.
>
> My library is now significantly larger; my Music folder has 7,857 folders in the root level (artificially inflated by 200-500 due to incorrect tags).
>
> I hardly ever have to care about the fact that I'm working with actual files, and it frees me to invest my time in tagging instead of file management.

Do you find it pleasant, when need be, to scroll down nearly 8,000 folders? Is that the optimal way for a root folder to be "organized"? Was the Hierarchical Filing System created for a good reason? Is hierarchical filing now obsolete? Is there some problem with iTunes allowing a user to elect to organize those files by genre?

Yes Hierarchical filing is now obsolete. It joined the horse and buggy.

There's no reason to use the system folder/file structure to organize your music.

It sounds like if you want to organize your music in a folder/file structure then you need to look elsewhere. When you have lemons make lemonade. When in Rome do as the Romans do. If you have a square peg don't try and cram it into a round hole.

[garyi]

Thats fair enough then. Can this be done on the ipod touch remote (I guess I will have to find out)

ONe bonus is that I could not share my mini library because the files were on a NAS, but now that works fine so thats a good thing.

[meta]

bq. Context, unless I misunderstand you, that is precisely what iTunes DJ (and Party Shuffle before it) does.
Pity iTunes DJ/Party Shuffle doesn't work on shared libraries, where all my music is, isn't it?

[sleepymonk]

As I sit here listening to my iPod on shuffle, I find myself supremely annoyed that Apple STILL has not done anything (as far as I can tell) to alleviate or fix the damage done by taking away the Smart Shuffle slider in the "upgrade" to iTunes 8. I always had it set at "least likely," but after switching from 7 to 8, my iPod most definitely is stuck in more of a "more likely" mode -- with no way at all (to the best of my knowledge) to change this. What's the point of shuffling songs, if you're going to hear two songs -- out of thousands -- off the same album back-to-back? It happened minutes ago, once again. So annoyed.

[mdawson]

The shuffle settings in iTunes had zero impact on the iPod.

[context]

trip1ex said:

Yes Hierarchical filing is now obsolete. It joined the horse and buggy.

There's no reason to use the system folder/file structure to organize your music.

It sounds like if you want to organize your music in a folder/file structure then you need to look elsewhere. When you have lemons make lemonade. When in Rome do as the Romans do. If you have a square peg don't try and cram it into a round hole.

This is as airtight an argument against innovation and improvement as I've encountered.

[context]

TiggoBitties said:

50MB? That's nothing... i'm at 50GB.

I suspect you must mean the size of your music library, including the song files, not the size of the "iTunes Library" file inside the iTunes folder. My song library is just over 600 GB.

[context]

rynosoft said:

bq. You have some music playing, you fancy the next track to be 'such and such' so in my mind clicking it or hold clicking it should stack it up ready to be played next.

Yes, you can do that with Party Shuffle/iTunes DJ. Ctrl-click (or right-click) on the song (or selected songs) and choose "Play Next in iTunes DJ".

Fantastic. I appreciate the correction.

[Plan_K]

sleepymonk, I'm with you. I hate that Apple removed the once much-touted Smart Shuffle feature from iTunes. Steve Jobs made a big deal of this feature at the time of its release, yet you and I are apparently the only ones who used it. :) However, I've found that when I set up a playlist to shuffle within iTunes, the resulting list comes out as if "least likely" was still set in Smart Shuffle?songs by the same artist don't play back to back (whether that is now the default mode or whether I have a hidden preference set somehow, I don't know). The problem happens when you move that playlist to another device?iPod, iPhone, AppleTV. When you shuffle the playlist, it seems, anywhere outside of iTunes, it often plays the same artist back to back. So I "pre-shuffle" the playlists in iTunes: I create the playlist within iTunes and turn on shuffle for that playlist. Then I transfer that shuffled playlist to my player (iPod, iPhone, AppleTV) and play that playlist unshuffled. Counterintuitively, by turning shuffle off, I get a playlist that is more shuffled, less likely to play the same artist or album back to back.

[sleepymonk]

"The shuffle settings in iTunes had zero impact on the iPod."

No disrespect, but I'm not convinced this is the case. Maybe it has to do with having an older model (fourth-gen). I never really noticed the "bad" shuffling on my iPod before switching to iTunes 8 last fall, but now I notice it nearly every day.