I love Winamp over iTunes because..

I personally have to agree with kevingpo on this one.

It would be good if Apple/iTunes did this sort of thing like Winamp. The intelligent/smart meta-data extracter from file name if tagless.

Also the visualization could be improved. As good as Winamp's plugin's.

And also the Library in iTunes. Make it like Winamp's Media Library.

Wishing here won't make it so. You'll need to Send Apple Your Feedback

I think this is a good opportunity for iTunes developers to take note of these for the next installment. It would be good to have these functionalities built-in. The option of not letting iTunes auto-tagging if you don't want it to. The feature of smart intelligent meta-data extracter from file-name if ID3 tag doesn't exist.

I used Winamp's Media Library and have to say that it's far more superior. The 3, 4 pane framed window is very nice. Full listing, artist list & album list sorts and makes it very easy to find songs at a glance.

When does the next version come out?

30 million songs? That must take terabytes of space. Unless you stored them as 8khz sampling rate 😉

Anyway. I like kevingpo's ideas and points.

Don't forget to give iTunes the functionality of mass ID3v1 & v2 removal by option.

I have too a large collection of MP3s that have spanned over the years since 1998. They were all backed up onto CD as I made room on my old hard drives. Since todays 250GB hard drives are affordable it's more likely to have a few. I digged out all my old MP3 collections from backed up CDs and put them all onto my PC so that I have easy access them them all. I then noticed how messy my naming standards have been over the past 7 years. For example:

1) Blur - Tender.mp3
15. nirvana-allapologies.mp3
breath [prodigy].mp3
Welcome To the Dance - Remix - DJ Dance.mp3

etc .etc. and more messy. It would be nice for an auto-cleaner in the iTunes player. Possibly recognising the different naming styles and then mass cleaning them all.

Winamp suffers from the same problems that, it seems to me, all media player software suffer from. They try to dumb down the user interface to the level of your car stereo - reducing the size of the main window and the layout of the information to look like an LCD display from your car. This is a PC (or a Mac). Mine has a 1240x1024 default screen resolution on a full color 19 inch LCD display. What the world needs is a media player that uses all of that area wisely and has NO scrolling portions. Why have to look at the screen for 10 seconds waiting for some display segment to scroll from the artist to the album name?

Why are there no media players that can provide some basic information about the currently playing track in an easy to read size that can be seen from across the room?

iTunes is close to being a good player, but still has scrolling while there is plenty of room do display the information without scrolling.

Great discussion! I used up all tonight's points on you posters.

I wish I could meld several programs into one, too.

Each has their claim to greatness.

If you only need the 4 information: album, track #, artist & track name then you don't need tags. If you need year, genre, tempo, etc. then that's fine.

Yes, well, I disagree. Proper tags, with as much info as possible, make working with your music so much easier and more fun.

The information I try to put in all my files:
-Artist
-Album
-Title
-Track number
-Total tracks on the disc
-Disc number
-Total Discs in set
-Year
-Genre
-Album Art
-Album Review
-URL to band site or album on Amazon
-Keywords
-Mood/style information
-Composer
-BPM
-Lyrics (soon, working on it now)

And so forth. The more information that the tag actually has, the better the library that can be built. And the better that library/database is, the easier and more capable things like "smart playlists" (or whatever the equivalent is in your player of choice) are to do.

So if I want to find all the upbeat and happy 80's music I have, I can. Or if I want to hear some early 90's grunge with a fast paced beat... The more information about the music you have, the better your selection capabilities can be.

With this system, filenames become almost irrelevant. I can mass rename my entire collection in a few minutes, based on the tag information. Filenames only matter in playlists because you're using outdated and obsolete playlist formats. M3U/PLS, for example, is little more than a list of files.

As for wasted space, disk space is cheap and only getting cheaper. I saw a 300 gig drive for $175 the other day. I mean, seriously, who cares that space is "wasted". If it's useful, then it's not a waste. The only reason player like Winamp and such use this smart filename stuff is because your tags are non-existent.

The problem there is that you don't have any incentive to create tags, because you don't see the possibilities inherent in proper tagging. "Oh, the filename is good enough if the player reads it smartly"... Well, that ain't the case. Not for more advanced functionality. And the odds of my tags being corrupted are far less than something deciding to rename my files. Storing metadata in filenames just isn't safe.

Really, having proper tags is definitely the way to go. Nearly all players support lots of tags and the number is increased. They've been the standard for 8 years or so. Some people just haven't heard about that, I guess.

I might be missing something since I am new to iTunes but it seems to have the worst track tag editor of any media player I have tried so far.

I agree that track tags are important. When I play my tunes on the PC then it is possible to extract the basic track information from the file structure, and basic is all I care about. One of the many complaints I have about WMP is that when I create a CD of MP3s for my car from WMP is that my car stereo always shows the artist or album as "Not Available" because the information is not in the track.

How hard would it be to make the tags customizable, allowing the user to select, from a list, which tags to store in the file? It seems to me that most, or all, media player applications are so full of fancy bells and whistles that none of them get the basics right.

Oh yeah, tagless is great.

And I'm trading in all my computers for an abacus.

Hey! I just had an outhouse installed in my back yard - it's cool. Indoor plumbing is way overrated.

Um. My point is tags (meta data) provide flexibility in dealing with huge volumes of data found in large music collections. Meta Data is becoming a computing standard as ordinary file name standards are no longer capable of supporting the amount of data needed to describe a "file".

P.S., please don't honk when you pass me in my horse and buggy.