Classic "missing the forest for the trees" situation I guess.

Is there a psychological term for failing to recognize flaws in something as flaws due to ignorance of alternatives that lack them?

If there is, then it must apply to me as I've never had problems with iTunes either. I've gone through 4 computers and never had this "shit getting deleted" problem everyone mentions.

Yeah me neither.

Me too. I'm sure there are good alternatives, but I don't need them at this point in time and haven't as long as I've been regularly buying albums and using an iPod. Unless there's something going wrong I don't see a reason to browse around for other programs. Point is, it gets me from Point A (having music) to Point B (being able to play said music on the go and on my iPod). I've had about 4-5 different computers in the 7 years or so I've been using iTunes, as well.

A random thought about people losing their music - Are you changing where certain music files are located after you rip the CD? If you have them in one location, then move them, iTunes won't be able to play them until you let it know the new file path.

I had nothing but problems. Every update seemed to make it worse and worse, too. At some point, the interface became absurdly confusing and ridiculous. The performance and stability of the software was laughable. It's doubtless one of the worst, most unnecessarily bloated pieces of shit I've ever had to use.

I just always move the music files to the "add to Itunes library" map, and it just automatically puts all the files where they should be. Have been doing this for years, and I never had a single account of missing files or updates fucking everything up.

@inhumanist.

I never felt the need to switch to a alternative, as Itunes provides everything I need in a music player: It plays every single music file I throw at it without problem.

Yeah, I've always had zero problems with iTunes and never understood where all the trouble came from. I've once been told that "Apple balances out the brilliance of the iPod with the colossal fuckup that is iTunes", and yet somehow I've had zero problems with iTunes in sevenish years but I'm on my fourth iPod. Go figure.

^ likewise. I haven't had a single problem with my library in like the 8 years I've had iTunes.

I've had the same iPod since 2007 and it's still going strong. It's outlasted a couple computers and about four cell phones I've had.

I've had my Zune for about the same amount of time, and likewise, it's still going strong.

You just can't find 120 GB mp3 players in many places, and you especially don't find them for free when your friend gets an iPod and gives you his leftovers.
(Fun Fact: He's on his 4th iPod now, and I've still got my Zune...)

Smartphones kind of crippled the MP3 player market. Few people want to carry around more than one device.

I really like device segregation on that front. For some reason I get paranoid about the prospect of being caught out and about with a dead cell phone, even though it's not even really all that long ago when I didn't have one at all. If my mp3 player battery dies, I can't listen to music anymore, while if my phone battery dies I could get stranded and die of exposure! Also, when I listen to music I like to simply focus on the music sometimes, and when I'm walking around or on the train or whatever it's a great time to really let albums sink in. If I was looking at song titles and stuff on my phone constantly, I feel like I'd get distracted by other phone-things and miss out on the music experience.

Unfortunately my Zune bricked so now I just use this crappy ancient 2 GB Creative Zen Stone. It works though, so there's that.

Biggest problem I have right now is that there's around 1.5Gb labelled "Other" visible on my iPod when I open it in iTunes. Can't seem to shift this. Also seem to sporadically get a whole bunch of deleted photos coming back onto the iPod when I try to sync it (I think they maybe come from iCloud, but I've tried to get rid of that...) and then I get told there's no space for music. Most frustrating. Generally a fan of iTunes as software though, I find the interface pretty good.

A few of my buddies were diehard Zune fans when those were the main competitors to iPods, and I just never bought into them. The interface seemed really unintuitive and they were unsightly bricks. Even in 2007 my iPod was sleek and efficient. There are/were those other competitors that theoretically have infinite space because you can switch out drives or something, but I dunno, it seems great in theory but I carry around 160 gigs of music at all times, and never once have I reached for something I didn't have. If it's not on there anymore, chances are I haven't listened to it in years and don't want to change that now.

Also, fuck playing music on your smartphone. My phones always end up with atrocious battery life anyway, and having my music interrupted whenever I get a text can fuck itself with dynamite.

Ipod Classic 160 gig the absolute bomb. I have been using one for over four years now. Never had a single problem with it, and I even accidentally let it drop to the floor a couple of times. It still handles incredibly smooth, and the battery life is great. Plus it doesn't have one of those annoying touch pads Ipods nano's have these days. I heard those things break incredibly quick.

My Ipod is like, 50% full right now, give or take a couple percents. It has been hovering around that mark for some time now. If I never deleted anything on it it would have been full, but I would also not have listened to those tracks for a couple of years. I just delete the things I don't listen to anymore every couple of months, so I really don't see the need for interchangeable drives. Feels like a gimmick more than anything.

Correct. Switched to Android with large SD-card a few years ago and never looked back. Apart from not having to carry more than one device I'm also not married to one specific, limited piece of firmware (e.g. the player I owned previously put a pause between all songs and there was absolutely no way to do anything about it ). Very liberating indeed.

@batman: That's why I always take a second battery and/or an old-school replacement cell phone on any longer trips (meaning the ones where I also take my backpack with me).

So you avoid the annoyance of carrying around a second device by carrying around extra batteries and phones? Noted.

I was never a Zune devotee. I had a 40GB second gen iPod that worked perfectly well until it finally bricked itself. I just got the Zune because, at the time, the only other option for a large-capacity mp3 player was an iPod classic and those were about three times as expensive as the refurbed Zune. Eventually I'll get one of those simple SD-card mp3 players; as long as it's got a decent screen with a basic but thorough UI I'll be happy.

Emphasis on my favorite part. Seriously, not only are these tanks like, Nokia-durable (I've also dropped mine onto the concrete more times than I'd care to admit and you'd never know if I didn't tell you), but the battery life is insane. Again, maybe it's because I'm used to my phone battery being so shit that if it makes it through my ten hour work day without dying it ends up being a cause for celebration, but charging my iPod once a week is a pretty damn awesome thing.

Backpack. They're in my backpack. The times where I don't have my backpack with me happen to be the ones where I don't need those things you know?

Right? I barely have to think about charging the thing, as attaching it to my laptop for 45 minutes while I delete/add music/browse forums/read mail, almost charges it up to full. And I do this more than a couple times a week. it's perfect.

Eh, I have an iPhone, use it a lot for music - Spotify is dope - and I'm rarely gone for so long that I need to worry about the battery dying, and if I am, I just don't really listen to music/in the car with a charger/with other people.

Swords and Leather is such a fucking jam. I gotta listen to Third Storm of Cythraul more. I know someone was recently commenting on how paper thin the guitars are. They do get lost in the mix but it only keeps me coming back and paying attention.

The only problem I've encountered in iTunes is that sometimes it skips certain songs when played on my iPod, but plays them fine in iTunes. I guess maybe it's just an issue with the iPod rather than iTunes. Other than that, it was slower than winamp, which is what I used before. I've been using iTunes since I got my iPod video in like 2006 and, other than that, it's been great. My video died in maybe 2008 or 2009 and I've had a refurbished 60gb classic since then. I'll be really sad when that thing dies, they are really great devices and I love having my entire library with me, even though it's probably not necessary.

I gave Third Storm of Cythraul another listen last week after that thread in the metal discussion forums and I still feel like I'm missing something. The guitar riffs, that I can hear, seem pretty typical. To me, the drums really shine on that album, but the guitars just sound a bit generic and samey. I much prefer an album like Tormentor's Anno Domini, which I guess is sort of stylistically similar.

Deep down, I knew starting the thread about the Cynic guys would go bad, but I did it anyways. Long way to go in society, much less societal subsets like the death metal scene.

also, back to fast casual food chains just b/c - places I suggest in the US would include (but are not limited to):

-Taco Cabana (popular in Texas, make actual decent fast food tacos)
-Portillo's (already covered kinda, Chicago area institution. I've heard Harold's Chicken Shack is good too speaking of Chicago chains)
-Earl of Sandwich
-Lee's Sandwiches
-any of the California burrito places (i.e. Chipotle)
-Smashburger
-In-N-Out (I mean, cmon)
-Penn Station Subs
-Zaxby's or Popeye's for fried chicken
-Culver's (burgers are OK, the frozen custard is v. good and much better than average soft serve stand)
-Dickey's BBQ (reasonably decent BBQ for when you're in the suburbs)

White Castle is....blah. I used to be able to go to Ted's Steamed Burgers in CT with little effort, so it's tough to move down to White Castle. Between the major burger chains, Wendy's is also objectively better than Burger King and McDonalds. But still, Wendy's is just ok.

Thanks for the Dickey's reminder. One opened last year just down the street from me, the first I've ever seen in my life. I went there a week or two after they opened and it pretty much blew, but it seemed like essentially none of the employees had any clue at all what the hell they were doing and there didn't seem to be a manager on duty, so it very well could've just been an unfortunate case of grand opening pains. I should go back and see if they've gotten their shit together. Apart from stuff that could be easily chalked up to that, though, my main gripe was just the prices - for a sort of austere fast casual barbecue place, it was barely cheaper than eating at a place like Famous Dave's and about the same price as Red Hot 'n' Blue.

That can be solved by making a copy of the original music file by right clicking the song in Itunes and clicking "make mp3 version" (I don't know the exact english sentence as my Itunes is set to dutch) Just delete the original copy afterwards and resync your Ipod.

I'm not one to really hound people about sticking with albums, because a lot of times I will dismiss something really quickly, BUT I just wanted to tell you that I felt the exact same way for the first few years I owned the album. The riffs just seemed flat to me, and that's in addition to being hard to make out in some sections. But for whatever reason (Probably because JM says it's their best and he's my guru) I stuck with it and it eventually just clicked. I think getting into the lyrics helped a lot, as well as listening with headphones. It's a "total package" album for me where I'm not just listening for specific riffs that slay. Although they are there, definitely.

Lot of the above page reads like this to me.... "There is nothing wrong with the 'software' I use, I know cause I can't possibly imagine anything better so there is no need to try anything else, yep".

No, it reads like this: "I never encountered any problems with the software I'm using so I never felt the need to try anything else and for good reason namely that the software I'm using works"

How is that head-to-wall worthy?

You might see it if you started using a linux distro with something truly fast like spectrwm and then something cool to listen to music with such as foobar2000, cmus, plait, or etc.

I actually don't mind Famous Dave's either. Truthfully, not everywhere in the world has access to capable BBQ and passable BBQ is better than none or bad stuff. I usually trend to being snobbish towards chains, but even I can't deny that I've come across some terrible food made by mom-and-pops. Chains are often the best representative of a particular style of food in some areas.

I actually don't mind Famous Dave's either. Truthfully, not everywhere in the world has access to capable BBQ and passable BBQ is better than none or bad stuff. I usually trend to being snobbish towards chains, but even I can't deny that I've come across some terrible food made by mom-and-pops. Chains are often the best representative of a particular style of food in some areas.

I know next to nothing about systems outside of windows, and I'm also not that interested in them. It's fine if you are, and for all I know they are actually better. I just don't need anything better to listen to music.

Wow, cmus is painful to even look at.

If that's indeed the case, I would be interested to hear how other audio players could improve my experience within the following parameters:

-I have not encountered any bugs in iTunes.
-I use iTunes as it allows me to easily sync my music with my iPhone
-I use Windows.

Fire away!

You might want something less bloated and RAM-heavy for starters. You might want greater control regarding the functions, look and behaviour of your player. You might want to be able to combine different modules to create exactly the program you want, nothing more or less. You might consider the marketing-driven software-development decisions of a multi-million dollar company a poor process to determine what your daily media-player experience should be like. Stuff like that.

The fact that there might be something "better" out there, doesn't mean anything anyway. Consumer products need to fit the need of their user, so if iTunes does everything that the user requires without any problems, then by definition it is a great product for them. Lots of "tech" savvy people are obsessed with lording over others the fact that their product is so much better, though. "Omg, you use the wrong browser/OS/media player/tablet/cellphone", it's fucking ridiculous. Tons of people out there use Norton Anti-Virus. Is it the best product out there? Of course not, but the fact remains that it meets most people's needs and you can usually get it on sale for cheaper than most of the other options out there. Another example: tons of people buy low end mobile hardware, but does the existence of better hardware negate the value of lower end products? Well that depends on the consumer's need. If the product meets all the parameters of a user's needs while maintaining a cost they are willing to pay then it has by definition done everything it needs to adequately.

The whole "brand" supremacy angle has been a huge part of internet/"tech" culture for as long as I can remember (being a kid on internet forums since the early 2000s) and I seriously don't get it. People will argue for their preferred brand with the tenacity of old political or nationalistic clashes (minus the violence, thank god) and you gotta wonder why the vitriol over something so petty? It's not like Google/Apple actually gives a shit about you or does anything for you other than provide you with the latest technological diversion.

edit: henkkjelle: you are a god amongst men, thank you so much for that tip!

So I've been getting into a lot of the "post prog" released on Kscope (after checking out nosound when I got an ad for their album with my Ulver blu-ray). Demon by Gazpacho is such a charming album, any fans here? Any thoughts on that "scene" overall? Maybe I'm just burned out on metal in general, but I find the compination of progressive/experimental tendencies with straight forward and catchy melodies and the accessibility of alt-rock to be fairly refreshing.

The first major bug I encountered with iTunes iPod syncing is something that snowballed into much larger problems with the software. Many albums would be added several times so each song on of certain (numerous) albums would appear twice. Trying to solve those problems by deleting everything and adding it at once caused the program to crash without fail.

Adding music to the library and then syncing that with the pod was extremely cumbersome (useless features and clunky UI), and I ended up putting everything straight to the pod without using the library. What I wanted was much less bells and whistles, simple and coherent UI, much better performance and less gamebreaking bugs. It was usable, even so, but a source of much frustration. I did look for alternatives, but I ended up simply using it less.

Okay, I know The 'Road Crew and I butt heads all the time, but how come none of you bastards tried telling me how their late 80s albums fit exactly into the paradigm I said would make them good? I complain about the lame vocals and halfhearted mid-paced riffing, but said the solos and fast songs were great, and yet none of you thought to point out that Mystification and Out of the Abyss are pretty much nothing but fast songs and endless solos? Fuck the epic stuff, fuck the galloping, this band was made for unbridled ferocity and a shameless lack of restraint.

Further reinforcing my idea that nobody read my Mysterium review past the first paragraph

Most of the time you just rave about how nerdy everyone is for liking stuff like that, maybe that's why!