And what a long, slow, weird, decline it's been since then.
Personally, I'm in the camp who kept a manually-organized directory tree for music for years, and would still prefer that mode of working, but even among my technical friends I think I'm in the minority there. Presumably Apple was right that this is what most people prefer.
That was what bothered me about iTunes...I was never sure WHERE things lived. Even if I pointed it at a folder, was that my music, or just an input source for where my music actually ended up living?
If you have "Organize my music" checked then iTunes copies the files to its library. If you have it unchecked, then the files stay where you left them.
¹Music available in iCloud Music Library but not explicitly downloaded locally doesn't offer this of course.
Music > Buckethead > Enter The Chicken > Funbus
But how do you file, say, classical music? Do I file this album under Wilhelm Furtwängler, the conductor? Do I file this under Bach and Beethoven, the conductors of various tracks? Do I file this under Wiener Philharmoniker?
In iTunes it’s irrelevant, because I can find the album by looking for Composer=Bach, Composer=Beethoven, artist=Wilhelm Furtwaengler, or artist=Wiener Philharmoniker. With a filesystem I would… use symlinks or something?
And just because a media player respects your filesystem doesn't mean you can't search by the metadata in the Mp3s. This is extra-helpful when you realize not all Mp3s have metadata. In that case, such search routines will just pass it by.
Seriously, I had my MP3s organized this way pre-iTunes. I get why that can’t scale to the general public, but I still think a tool could approximate it.
I know what hard links are.
> I get why that can’t scale to the general public
So why suggest it as a solution?
> pre-iTunes
So even you gave up on it?
Further, it's hard to imagine how the hard link system could ever be as flexible as even an average music library program, where you can trivially find songs released between 1990 and 1995, with at least one play count, and then have them sorted by beats per minute.
Music libraries act as relational databases, which are a far more powerful data modeling tool than the file system.
This is one of my peeves with the 40's channel on Sirius. There could be the wonderful voice of a woman singing a song, but the display will only read "Benny Goodman Orchestra."
(That's basically what iTunes does now, except the exact behavior is hidden behind a mysterious "Keep iTunes Media folder organized" checkbox, and the index is stored in big opaque XML files rather than Spotlight.)
My email has hierarchical folders, too, but I don't know anyone who worries about the folder structure of their email. All messages are indexed, and search is quick, so there's not much point.
The answer is probably in the realm of “That’s how we wrote desktop apps back then.”
Files are not real things. Just identifiers for an organization of bits that sound like a Neil Young sing when played through the correct decoder.
You can organise your collection how you like. There is no right answer (although its obviously by genre).
If you're indecisive then just dump everything into one huge flat file, or just add links.
An album like 2.0 by Big Data would create 10 different distinct "artists" in most music players:
Big Data and White Sea
Big Data and Joywave
Big Data and Jamie Lidell
Big Data and Kimbra
Big Data and Rivers Cuomo
Big Data
Big Data and Jenn Wasner
Big Data and Dragonette
Big Data and Bear Hands
Big Data and Twin Shadow
Even Amazon Music had this problem up until 2018 or so, when my library collapsed from nearly 2000 "artists" to ~300 actual.
With iTunes you could have smart playlists like “create a list of all of the songs I haven’t played in X days”.
Normal people didn’t want to tag songs and use the filesystem.
Do I really need to bring up the “No Wireless. Less Space than a Nomad. Lame.” Meme and how geeks didn’t get the iPod?
https://slashdot.org/story/01/10/23/1816257/apple-releases-i...
A la M3u files.
You really think the iTunes filesystem layout is what made iPod successful?
Not, say, the fact that it was solid hardware, good UI, etc., from a desirable brand?
The comment was saying, my read of it anyway, is they didn't appreciate that it would slurp up and rename the files you give it.
But iTunes didn’t “slurp up and rename files” unless you enabled the option for it to manage your underlying file.
You miss the point with this question. A media player managing playlists certainly can. Or it can manage m3u files. Or it can put them in an sqlite db. Or ...
You posed as an intractable problem unless we adopt iTunes thinking.
Literally iTunes does this, by default, without changing its configuration.
You can manage the files yourself and point it at that, but the default, eg. if you choose to open a file from any old place, is to copy into its own naming and organization scheme.
That is not the default when you install iTunes it asks you whether you want it to “manage your music”. This is not a new behavior - note the date on the above post.
People love to bring this up... but that product (pretty much) did fail, in no small part because it had less space than a Nomad. The iPod wasn't successful until a couple revisions later and after the introduction of iTunes (which led to an end-to-end rethink of how you loaded music on these devices). No matter how hard Apple-acolytes want it to be true, if I come out with a bad product, and then later come out with a good product, it doesn't make the bad product retroactively awesome.
There was a winner
What part changed during the iPod era.
https://macdailynews.com/2007/02/06/apple_ceo_steve_jobs_pos...
The major things that changed after the iPod was released: adding online music sales, switching from FireWire to USB for all the people stuck with the slower Windows hardware interface, and iTunes for Windows.
None of those changed the core iPod design; I don’t think the first one failed in any meaningful way.
https://macdailynews.com/2007/02/06/apple_ceo_steve_jobs_pos...
Through the end of 2006, customers purchased a total of 90 million iPods and 2 billion songs from the iTunes store. On average, that’s 22 songs purchased from the iTunes store for each iPod ever sold.
Today’s most popular iPod holds 1000 songs, and research tells us that the average iPod is nearly full. This means that only 22 out of 1000 songs, or under 3% of the music on the average iPod, is purchased from the iTunes store and protected with a DRM.
This geek doesn't understand why we need two nearly-identical systems. Once you make the more-general form, refactor the prototype to use it!
Normal people wouldn't need to "use the filesystem" any more than they do with iTunes now. Just make iTunes use these features internally so we don't have two incompatible sets of tools, and two separate sets of bugs.
They are already used by Windows to provide the major Documents, Music, Pictures, Videos, etc. locations.
https://windowsreport.com/enable-libraries-windows-10-file-e...
And another how to article.
https://windowsreport.com/enable-libraries-windows-10-file-e...
This is why geeks end up designing Homermobile type solutions and wonder why the common person is confused.
"?playedLast < 30d" is not a hard query filter
People don't care about how the files are stored, and they shouldn't need to. We've seen this in everything from music catalogs to file sharing to productivity software. We want content organized logically with metadata, tags, folders, lists and search that's completely removed from the physical location. Let the computers do what they're good at while the software lets you consume it the way you want.
The problem is that there's a lot of room for interpretation as to what is the best way to actually translate media metadata into an organizational scheme. Furthermore, the most appropriate interpretation is DIFFERENT depending on the type and/or genre of the music.
Most metadata-oriented media players tend to pick one scheme, apply it across the board, and completely screw up somewhere along the way. For whatever kind of music the developers had in mind, it'll work okay. For anything else, it's borderline unusable as you constantly struggle to find/browse what you're looking for.
The second clause of this sentence is a pretty good software design value. The first part is overgeneralizing at best.
Some people care very much about where in a folder/directory system their files are stores. I'm not just talking about HN audiences, I'm talking about actual people I've observed from personal acquaintances to real live user testing. Files are not some weird obscure technical point they're a dominant metaphor that's been used in computing workflows longer than more than half of HN has likely been adults. Lots of people know and care how they work.
This is especially true for music files, where people have been ripping, transcoding, slicing/processing into derivative works, backing up, and yes sometimes sharing files for longer than iTunes has existed.
They're not perfect for every application and user. An application-specific database with a different use profile might be good to have between the filesystem and a user. Users shouldn't have to care.
But if we really mean "the software lets you consume it the way you want" then you don't really want it completely removed from filesystem location. You want to keep facilities that allow users to find underlying files and keep them easy enough to find. You want to accommodate use profiles where users may bring in files from outside your curated market, or even choose to intentionally organize files in a way that your application doesn't by default.
Most people are not concerned about files, they want music. Tracks, playlists, artists, albums, etc. That's how they think and interact, and this abstraction provides that rich interface. That's why it's so seamless to switch from iTunes to Spotify where everything is streaming, because the basic primitives are not files.
If you do want to handle the raw files then there's nothing stopping you, but it's definitely a tiny minority.
I mean, yes. Files as we're speaking of them are in fact this very thing themselves. But:
> Most people are not concerned about files
Do you know how you know that? Is it based off of observation, or is it a story you like to tell yourself?
Like I said, I'm not pulling this out of my nose, I'm basing this off of real life observations including non-technical users. It isn't everyone who wants files in every case, but it is waaay more than a tiny minority. It's a little complicated given that you've got at least two curves you're dealing with (user experience and very roughly speaking intelligence), but if you imagine a bell curve and draw a line about a half standard deviation down from the median, roughly everyone north of that will likely care about files or file-related behavior at some point.
> they want music.
Ask yourself this: do you see "Copy Song Link" with Spotify tracks? What exactly do you think Activities are doing all over iOS?
These are ways of directing/handling files.
> If you do want to handle the raw files then there's nothing stopping you
Except sometimes in applications written/designed by people who think "they want music" means "Most people are not concerned about files."
I'm not sure what you mean.
iTunes brought library management and meta data editing to the masses, which is a good thing. While Roon is my main player/management software I still use iTunes to sync to iOS devices. Of course I won’t let iTunes move any files - there’s an option that tells iTunes not to move anything. So you could actually have it both ways: Use your preferred file structure and benefit from proper library management software.
I use Spotify on my phone but I’m someone who listens to pretty much all the same music that I always have, so Spotify is more replicating my mp3 collection due to a lack of being able to have Winamp on iOS. I’d love to have Winamp on mobile though, it’s still the easiest fastest and cleanest music player I’ve ever used.
(For instance, the ability in a shuffle to right click a song for it to play next in the queue, and then have it return to the shuffle. Or to shuffle entire albums, playing the albums in track order but shuffling which album is next.)
Several custom modular interfaces are a tab-switch away. Takes a while to get everything the way you like it but you've got modules for autotagging, working integration with Winamp's Milkdrop2 (and any other Winamp plugins one might have), youtube search & playback, lyric fetching, advanced playlist organization, direct playback from VGM music files, pop-up search, artist bio fetching, etc.
It's very easy to get exactly where you want to be with a custom queue within seconds.
I would also recommend Amarok, not sure how it performs on Windows, but there's a KDE build[0]. It comes a lot more configured out of the box, plus it's still fairly customizable and its playlist creation features surpass even fb2k's.
[0] https://community.kde.org/Amarok/GettingStarted/Download/Win...
You might try VLC for a GUI.
It felt to me like too much style over some unstable software.