Apple music player alternatives

[pig pen]

I have been absorbed into the collective and swapped my old phone for an iPhone. Now, how do I get a replacement for the crappy music player that comes with the phone? There are so many music apps that I can't make heads or tails of what to get. The main thing I am looking for is the ability to shuffle based on albums (unless there is a way to do that within the player).

I have googled the issue and most of the apps I have seen mentioned seem to solve a lot of problems that don't seem like anything meaningful.

[steve(thelil)]

I think you can shuffle within an album (not sure) on an iPhone/IOS/ w/iTunes. However, I think that with the current versions you can no longer shuffle within a genre or across genres, which I miss.

That said, I bet you'd find any other music player alternatives frustrating (and maybe more frustrating) in other ways. So much about Apple hardware/software is intuitive that one tends to take it for granted.

[pig pen]

So much about Apple hardware/software is intuitive that one tends to take it for granted.

I guess I haven't been fully assimilated yet since I find it to be anything but intuitive.

In terms of being able to shuffle by album I mean that when I'm driving I like to just hit play and have my current iPod (an ancient 120gb iPod classic) with it set to shuffle by album. That way I hear entire albums rather than just individual tunes. The player that came with my iPhone 5s seems to only be able to shuffle by song (unless I am missing something which is entirely possible).

I have found some very cool apps though (garageband, ireal pro and a few others) so all is not lost.

[steve(thelil)]

It's the software. But it's still weird. I wonder if there are more ways to shuffle but I simply haven't looked to them because you don't do it the same way I used to. BTW, when I first got my iPhone, the operation and functions of the player were virtually identical to my old iPod's, FWIW.

[Monte Smith]

Most of the complaints I hear about Apple, I don't understand. Because Apple products are great. But complaints about iTunes, I totally agree with. Because iTunes sucks.

[Tom Storer]

I read somewhere that the reason iTunes stands out among Apple products in its sucky interface is that it was developed by another company that Apple acquired and was then just rebranded. And indeed Wikipedia confirms this: "SoundJam MP, developed by Bill Kincaid and released by Casady & Greene in 1999, was renamed iTunes when Apple purchased it in 2000."

I just looked at the iPhone music player and couldn't find a way to shuffle albums either.

What's funny is that before the iPod etc. made "shuffle mode" a possibility, it was never missed. Now it is a need.

[steve(thelil)]

Not having any alternatives to compare it to, I'm basically quite happy with iTunes. The main thing I use it for is podcasts. For me the ease of subscribing to podcasts and transferring them to my phone - you basically do nothing except connect the computer to phone- is fantastic.

[pig pen]

What's funny is that before the iPod etc. made "shuffle mode" a possibility, it was never missed. Now it is a need.

It isn't so much that it's a need. I always find it annoying when an "improvement" to software results in the loss of functionality that was there in the previous version. Apple isn't the only one guilty of that.

[bluenoter]

What's funny is that before the iPod etc. made "shuffle mode" a possibility, it was never missed. Now it is a need.

As you know, that's a big "etc."; all manner of stationary players had already offered shuffle mode for years. Shuffle mode isn't a need for me; on the contrary, I don't think I've ever used it. Then again, I don't own any kind of portable device (other than a basic cell phone on which I don't have a data plan) or a vehicle, so no portable tunes for me in any mode. Portable tunes aren't a need for me either.

---Ritasaurus

[Chazro]

I'd say 90+% of the 3300 songs on my pod are from my CD/LP collection. I very rarely download complete recordings (I cherry-pick my favorite tunes). For a longtime 'compilations' recorder like myself my pod is my ultimate 'greatest hits compilation'! Set on shuffle songs/no repeat, it's become my favorite source! For example, while typing this I heard Los Lobos/Michael Brecker/Celia Cruz!;)

[John L]

And getting worse. iTunes 11.1 has been an abomination from roll out.

Absolutely. iTunes 11 is a major deterioration from iTunes 10. I am really pissed off about it too. Most iTunes upgrades are for the worst. My biggest problem is that I have a very large collection. So iTunes freezes all the time, sometimes for quite a while. Apple keeps thinking that they are improving iTunes by creating more automatic functions that actually slow things down for me and make the freezes more frequent and for longer times. The new iTunes also screws up my iPods royally. If I try to connect an iPod and iTunes freezes during the time that it is suppose to receive the iPod, it will churn for up to 30 minutes and then force me to reset the iPod to factory settings and reload all the music to it again. In one case, it completely destroyed the iPod and I can't even put music on it any more.

I am almost ready to abandon Apple and look for other alternatives.

[Coda]

I use the Amazon Cloud player on my iPad: http://www.engadget.com/2013/10/29/amaz ... es-to-mac/

It has a shuffle and can toggle between music stored on your device and up in their cloud. If you have Prime you get space for music.

[LennyH]

Brother I am not joking when I say I have to force quit iTunes almost daily.

And I figured that was because the Windows version of iTunes particularly sucks. Thought Macs were probably immune. The last few times I shut it down the regular way it actually worked. Let's hope it's a trend.

I've had more trouble with iTunes over the years. When I used to bitch and moan about it, even on JC, people didn't seem to relate.

[Chazro]

While I've heard endless tales of iTunes suckage, I've never had a glitch, go figure! I've never done cloud sharing or even a podcast but I haven't a clue whether that means anything. It certainly shouldn't, right? I do have a problem that, being computer illiterate, maybe one of you guys can suggest a cure. I filled my 30GB pod and bought a 160GB with the idea being to really load the sucka with my tunes. Well, I'm not even 30% done and my computers run out of disc space! It's my older unit that I ONLY use for tunes and photos but....I've even downloaded the pix to disc and deleted them from the computer, I gained some space but quickly used it up. Any suggestions would be much appreciated!

[Monte Smith]

iTunes never fails to mess up my album art. Should be such a simple thing.

[John L]

While I've heard endless tales of iTunes suckage, I've never had a glitch, go figure! I've never done cloud sharing or even a podcast but I haven't a clue whether that means anything. It certainly shouldn't, right? I do have a problem that, being computer illiterate, maybe one of you guys can suggest a cure. I filled my 30GB pod and bought a 160GB with the idea being to really load the sucka with my tunes. Well, I'm not even 30% done and my computers run out of disc space! It's my older unit that I ONLY use for tunes and photos but....I've even downloaded the pix to disc and deleted them from the computer, I gained some space but quickly used it up. Any suggestions would be much appreciated!

Get a few external hard drives. My iTunes collection is over a TB in size. So keeping it on a computer hard drive is not an option in any case. So copy your iTunes files to an external hard drive, go to preferences/advanced and select the hard drive external iTunes music file as your default. One very important word of advice here: Back up this external hard drive with another, preferably with two. External hard drives are fragile and can fail completely without warning. Of course, computer hard drives can also fail easily. So maybe you are already backing up your library.

[John L]

iTunes never fails to mess up my album art. Should be such a simple thing.

I particularly hate the way that iTunes stores album cover art. They don't even keep the jpg files, but convert them into some other BS and then store them into numerous folders without any sort of legible labels or identification. My external hard drive died on me not long ago. So I hooked up my backup. Everything was fine...except iTunes somehow no longer recognized any of the cover art even though the same ART file was still there in the directory. If they had used some sort of clear link up between the music files and the art files, it could have been fixed. But no...

[Chazro]

@John L - thx buddy! Exactly the type of info I was hoping for. I briefly went looking and like in all things electronic, the variety and costs are all over the place! I'll be digging in over the weekend to figure out what to get. Might you have any product recommendations that I could use as a starting point?

[Chazro]

Thx Scott! But I'm not using a mac. It's an old HP. Whenever I look for new 'toys' I try to find the recognized 'giant-killer' within the category. Great performance, great build quality, and CHEAP!;)

[John L]

Chaz - Yes, Western Digital makes quality external drives for PCs. I would only strongly recommend again that you get at least two and back everything up. Western Digital external drives will fail eventually, and often without warning. There is no way to stop them from wearing out with use.

[jtx]

Old thread, but new advice. To store music, I would recommend NAS with redundant drives, which has now become affordable. Western Digital has the EX2 (2 drives) and EX4 (4 drives) My Cloud devices available now.

http://www.wdc.com/en/products/products.aspx?id=1180

I have just ordered the 8TB version of the EX2, which really means 4TB of storage. I get the feeling I will fill it up rapidly, but it will provide a much more dependable location for all of my music files than the single 1TB external drive I am using now.

I keep it really simple when it comes to a software music player: foobar2000 (http://www.foobar2000.org/)

And for portable playback, I used an older 80GB iPod with Rockbox installed on it (so I can use whatever lossy encoder I want).

Neither of the above have any issues with album art at all.

[LennyH]

I'm ready to ditch iTunes if I can find an alternative. I've got like 11,000 tunes, IIRC. I don't know whether it's because of the number of songs chokes iTunes or whatever but now I can't even use the search window. If I want to find a certain album or artist, I type something in and the program freezes immediately. crtl-alt-delete and shut down every time. It blows.

[Ron Thorne]

Lenny, between John L's post #16 and yesterday's post by jtx, I think you may have your answers. jtx is Justin, our technical guy who has a rather large music collection, too.

If you have further questions, by all means post them.

[jtx]

I am running 8200 tracks currently on Foobar2000. No issues at all. It has a more rudimentary interface when compared to the slick iTunes presentation, but it just works once you have it customized for your own setup.

I should also add it has a lot of plugins available for just about every audio format out there, so if you ever needed to transcode a FLAC or 320 kbps MP3 into a smaller MP3, AAC or any other format, it can handle it.

[LennyH]

Lenny, between John L's post #16 and yesterday's post by jtx, I think you may have your answers. jtx is Justin, our technical guy who has a rather large music collection, too.

If you have further questions, by all means post them.

Ron, maybe I'll look into jtx's recommendations later, but, for now, I installed MediaMonkey and it's working well. It easily finds the iTunes library and indexes it. It imported everything except for my playlists, which an add-on script took care of. It ain't pretty, and I'm still getting used to the interface, but I'm listening to it right now and haven't had any hitches. I haven't tried to update podcasts or anything like that but I think I might still use iTunes for that, since that's not where my troubles have been. I might just use MediaMonkey for a music player. I like the way you can minimize it to the systray and right click to do all of the basic stuff: pause/stop/next, etc.

I haven't seen foobar2000 yet but, I'll have a look. Sounds like it's simple like Media Monkey is, which is usually my preference. I prefer basic and simple over slick interfaces.

Thanks, guys.