[nategri]

I remember when iTunes came out for Windows ca. 2003. I had friends with Macs so I leapt at the chance to try it for myself---it just seemed lightyears ahead of whatever I was using to interface with my music library at the time (Winamp, probably).

And what a long, slow, weird, decline it's been since then.

[kvark]

Minority here, I never understood why music players shifted towards iTune-ish style of owning and re-categorizing everything in their own way... I mean, OS has a file system, why not just rely on it? Throw some searchable tags in, and you get the same abilities but without obscurity.

[scarface74]

No you don’t.

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...

[asveikau]

I think you may be envisioning two extremes when the parent comment wants a happy medium. I.e. files on disk in any way the customer wants, but add a db on the side to do things like play counts and tags. With reasonable defaults for most people who don't care about filesystem layout.

[klodolph]

> files on disk in any way the customer wants, but add a db on the side to do things like play counts and tags

Literally iTunes does this, by default, without changing its configuration.

[asveikau]

When you open a file, it copies it, renaming it in the process.

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.

[scarface74]

https://discussions.apple.com/thread/1845699

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.

[dwaite]

That is how I always use iTunes, since the music was stored on my NAS. There is/was no requirement for iTunes to manage the storage and filesystem organization of your music - that was just the default.

[mixmastamyk]

The problem wasn't really at the iTunes end, that's just a symptom. It was at the iPod end. You'd go to a friends house and want to copy a few songs over from a Windows box and couldn't do it without installing a hundred gig monstrosity.

[scarface74]

The filesystem is strictly hierarchal. How do you have one song in multiple playlists without duplicating the songs? How do you propose to make that usable for the average person. History kind of proves that Apple took the right approach in the iPod era. The simple drag files to an attached device MP3 players failed to become successful.

[asveikau]

Putting aside what has been mentioned elsewhere on the thread (m3u playlists, hardlinks) or similar technical solutions...

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.

[scarface74]

You want normal people to use hard links?

But iTunes didn’t “slurp up and rename files” unless you enabled the option for it to manage your underlying file.

[benj111]

Just have the playlist be a list of links to files?

A la M3u files.

[saurik]

> 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?

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.

[corobo]

On the other hand I know what an iPod is, only ever heard of a Nomad through the quoted quote

There was a winner

[saurik]

Yes... a _company_ (Apple) won under a cohesive brand (iPod), but _that product which was being reviewed at the time_ did not. Nothing about what happened with later products retroactively changes whether the physical product that people had in their hands was good or not, or whether their review _of that specific product_ was fair.

[scarface74]

The product at the time had iPod+iTunes+smaller form factor+faster charging+interface.

What part changed during the iPod era.

[macintux]

As pointed out, iTunes predates the iPod.

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.

[saurik]

Sorry: I specifically meant "the iTunes Music Store", which was where I was going with "end-to-end rethink". iTunes existed as a music player, but it wasn't until they provided a way to buy songs using it as part of a cohesive service that it was game changing for the industry, and that wasn't until the third-generation iPod came out.

[scarface74]

According to Steve Jobs “Thoughts on Music” essay posted in 2007, only 3% of music on the typical iPod was bought on iTunes. This was original posted on Apple’s home page. So it wasn’t the music store that made that much difference.

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.

[the_jeremy]

iTunes was already out when the iPod was announced.

[saurik]

Sorry: I specifically meant "the iTunes Music Store", which was where I was going with "end-to-end rethink". iTunes existed as a music player, but it wasn't until they provided a way to buy songs using it as part of a cohesive service that it was game changing for the industry, and that wasn't until the third-generation iPod came out.

[scarface74]

And still only 3% of Music on the iPod was bought from the music store according to Steve Jobs himself - 4 years after the store came online. That didn’t make much of a difference.

https://macdailynews.com/2007/02/06/apple_ceo_steve_jobs_pos...

[scarface74]

The nomad used a 3.5” inch hard drive so was much bigger and used USB1.1 which was much slower than FireWire.

[altmind]

“create a list of all of the songs I haven’t played in X days” - this can easily be done in winamp. they got full query language that can be saved as a playlist. i even think they got this as one of pre-sets.

[scarface74]

Yes because giving users “a full query language” is appropriate for the masses....

[altmind]

Well, I only measure the things how they work for me. And these smart playlist were the default - you can press "edit" and see how they did it to learn and customize.

"?playedLast < 30d" is not a hard query filter

[ken]

Since 10.4, the Finder has had Smart Folders for this. (I believe Windows got a similar feature in Vista.) Apple even bragged that it worked "Just like iTunes" when they introduced it.

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.

[scarface74]

Where are these smart folders in native Windows? The closest I see is a “saved searched” and this is really more obtuse than creating a playlist.

[manigandham]

Windows 10 calls them Libraries. Open your explorer and it's in the left sidebar. You can create new ones to group files and folders together regardless of where they physically reside.

They are already used by Windows to provide the major Documents, Music, Pictures, Videos, etc. locations.

[scarface74]

So this is what you’re going to have to tell users to do to enable them in Windows 10.

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.

[manigandham]

Since HN likes technical analogies: why do you use a RDBMS instead of flat files?

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.

[wwweston]

> People don't care about how the files are stored, and they shouldn't need to.

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.

[manigandham]

The separation between logical and physical data is a very old concept used to enhance UX everywhere and has been the general trend for decades.

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.

[wwweston]

> The separation between logical and physical data is a very old concept used to enhance UX everywhere and has been the general trend for decades.

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."

[octorian]

> We want content organized in a logical manner with tags, folders, lists and search that's completely removed from the physical location.

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.

[manigandham]

The whole point is you can structure it however you want because of the separation between logical and physical representation. Some players are better and more flexible than others but that separation is still a requirement to offer any kind of rich interface beyond just files on a disk.

[chrisseaton]

Because despite what everyone thinks again and again, music is not hierarchical, as a file system is. Does my album go under the composer, the conductor, the orchestra or the soloist?

[reaperducer]

Does my album go under the composer, the conductor, the orchestra or the soloist?

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."

[scrooched_moose]

I'm still annoyed how long it took to get "featuring" to be a common tag.

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.

[brians]

Hard links are going to blow your mind. https://www.gnu.org/software/libc/manual/html_node/Hard-Link...

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.

[jaredklewis]

For one thing, even if this was a good idea, you would still need a tool to covert the meta information from the ID3 tags that come with your music from amazon, iTunes Store, or wherever into a myriad of hard links.

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.

[chrisseaton]

> Hard links are going to blow your mind.

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?

[mixmastamyk]

Imagine... a program that could automate this for you. We could call it an "Application."

[benj111]

How do I organise my album collection? Alphabetically? By genre? Year? Record label?

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.

[ken]

Same as any other document on my disk: it doesn't matter. Just dump everything in there and let Spotlight index it.

(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.

[jjdjr0odo7]

Why can’t it read what’s what and generate a map without all the mv’ing?

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.

[dwaite]

It seems many people also under the misunderstanding that iTunes has to control the location of your music - that was just the default

[ErikAugust]

It goes under Albums, no?

[klodolph]

The question is how you organize the albums, hierarchically. The easy case is when you have artist/album/track, like:

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?

[mynameishere]

Beethoven goes under Beethoven. No one groups stuff by orchestra.

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.

[klodolph]

But filing it under Beethoven means that the album is split apart. This doesn’t make sense to me.

[chrisseaton]

That was my point... you're not really using the filesystem. It's just a big pile of files if you stick it all in Albums. iTunes organises that because the filesystem can't.

[sethhochberg]

I have a lot of friends who do literally all of their work out of their "Downloads" folder - I don't know how they survive that way, but they love music players which they can just point at a directory and say "index this and make a neat library" and know that everything lives in one place.

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.

[ergothus]

> know that everything lives in one place.

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?

[reaperducer]

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.

[eridius]

If you right-click any local song¹ there's an option in the context menu to show the song in the Finder.

¹Music available in iCloud Music Library but not explicitly downloaded locally doesn't offer this of course.

[klodolph]

What are you asking for, specifically? iTunes lets you organize music how you want on the filesystem, or you can let it organize the music for you. The only thing it doesn't do is present a view of the filesystem, but the Finder already has that.

[kvark]

I guess what I'm missing is just system-standard metadata format, like the one BeFS featured back in the day.

[thirdsun]

But there is a standard for tagging audio data and iTunes uses it, just like any other half decent audio player / music management software. As long as your meta data is clean your library should present in a very consistent way between different players.

[jrochkind1]

The files managed by iTunes on MacOS are indeed on the file system, and indeed organized in directories by artist name and album name (from the tags).

I'm not sure what you mean.

[thirdsun]

I consider myself a huge music collector/enthusiast that maintains a carefully organized collection and the file system is way too limited to handle anything but the most simple music organization and browsing tasks. I’d go as far as far as suggesting that relying on the file system is a rather casual way of handling a music collection.

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.

[mcrider]

OS level doesn't have enough metadata. I remember tirelessly starring and categorizing my music to make smart playlists -- AFAIK you can't do that in the OS without some weird file naming schemes and a lot of extra work.

[cuddlybacon]

What do you get from having the OS filesystem do the organization?

[kvark]

I get better reliability (say, restoring after power shutdown), portability (can copy files via external drives and/or network), discoverability (songs show up in regular search), interoperability (hypothetically, I'd be able to drag a song file into my browser to share it, accompanies by full metadata), and finally simplicity of the software (no need to reinvent the filesystem).

[mullingitover]

iTunesFS sort of gives you this. You get a read-only disk that maps to the iTunes database. Playlists are their own directories, along with artists, albums, etc.

[khazhou]

I was a long-time winamp user and I've still never found that sweet spot in any new player, of being able to easily queue up albums and always be listening to exactly what I want, in the order I want.

[soulofmischief]

Also chiming in for foobar2k.

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...

[Sendotsh]

I still use Winamp 2.x on my Win 10 PC. I have had my MP3s sorted as /mp3/genre/artist/album since mp3s first started and it suits me just fine. I’ll right-click either a genre, artist, or album folder and Play In Winamp.

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.

[WorldMaker]

Foobar 2000 is probably the closest to an honest successor of WinAMP's queue support. It's visually boring, but gets the job done well and is configurable and extendable to other needs. Has all sorts of power user options for shuffle modes, play queue management, and play list management.

(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.)

[downtide]

And it has only gotten worse and worse. I still resort to Foobar2k on Linux under Wine, because it seems to be one of the only apps that has it all.

[dredmorbius]

Frankly, console/command-line players, mostly mpv/mps and kin, hit that spot for me now.

You might try VLC for a GUI.

[return1]

that s not my memory at all. there were tons of all kinds of fancy player players in linux or windows (winamp? i dont think it was relevant then). Itunes was nothing special, in fact it was so odd that it had to scan every file, and have its own library, ending up with a stale library if you deleted a few songs. I doubt people who did not purchase songs used it

[duxup]

I remember doing that and hating the fiddly interfere and instability of iTunes.

It felt to me like too much style over some unstable software.