Goodbye Itunes

Jame5

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Hi forum members

I've just uninstalled Itunes after an infurating incident involving the loss (not deletion) of almost every track in my library.

I'm using an external USB DAC, so I gather that I wasn't getting a bit-perfect stream with Itunes anyway. If anyone can recommend a new media player for me I'd appreciate it. I know people use JRiver and Foobar. Any views on which is superior, or any other recommendations would be great.

Also if there is any software that will search through Itunes's crappy file structure and organse everything back into artist / album that would be great, although I fear that a fresh rip will be my only option (especially as a lot of it was in Apple Lossless format).

Hope someone can help. Thanks in advance!

James
 

basshound

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I use Jriver and would recommend it especially if you like to tweak. Have you actually lost all your files ? If you stil have them you can convert them from Alac or whatever format into flac rather than have to re-rip all your cd`s.I`d also recommend ripping any future cd`s into flac and keeping a seperate backup on an external hard drive.
 

Jame5

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Thanks very much for the responses!

The files are as good as lost. Quite a lot are in a folder called "unknown artist" and I have far too much music to recognise the track names in the file names.

Two votes for JRiver. Do I need to get the paid for version if I'm just using it for music?
 

pauln

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Why not try foobar for free and see how you get on? It doesn't do anything with your files so no risk if you uninstall it later. You should also back up your music folder too. I don't know how itunes works so have no idea how it can mess things up so badly but I can't see anyway that foobar could.
 

basshound

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Jame5 said:
Do I need to get the paid for version if I'm just using it for music?

D/L the trial version and get it to import your music and see if it sorts it out any,AFAIK the trial version does not have any restrictions so if it does the job and you like it you can then get the paid version,there are also other apps that (claim to ) sort out music tagging,Google mp3 tagger or similar.
 

Vladimir

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drummerman said:
Musicbee

regards

Brilliant player.

thumbsup.gif
 

MajorFubar

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Good luck getting it sorted, some great suggestions above. I feel your pain but:

Jame5 said:
Itunes's crappy file structure

...iTunes' "crappy file structure" is in fact very solid. It would be interesting to know what you did to EDIT it up.
 

fr0g

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Good call.

iTunes is not a music player. It's a flabby mess and primarily a shop.

I use Foobar, but I would also recommend Media Monkey and Helium.
 

MajorFubar

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ReValveiT said:
Always hated iTunes with a passion. Horrid software that Apple (whom I like) should be utterly ashamed of.

Vent over.

Is it just that it runs rubbish on PCs? Never quite figured out why some people have such venomous hatred for it. Not that I have much experience with alternatives, I've never felt the need to...
 

Dom

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IMO Foobar is brilliant, its free and lets you get bit-perfect bits. My ears can not tell the difference between direct sound and WASAPI, FWIW i prefer DS.

Maybe its my budget cables lol.

Bye.
 

Jame5

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Thanks very much for all the helpful comments. After a little googling, I went for Musicbee. I thought I should try one of the free options. Wonderfully, this did a five minute search of my hard drive and found all (I think) of my music (something that I couldn't get iTunes to do). Thanks Drummerman!

I response to the question above (major fubar?) about what I did to the file structure, I tried to create a separate library of MP3s for use on my android OS phone. When I selected the old library again iTunes couldn't find the files (which I think were still where it had put them in the first place). I'm sure that I could have done something to prevent this, but the iTunes's apparent inabiliity to re-find the files where it put them really annoyed me, hence the uninstall.

All was good with Musicbee until I tried to use WASAPI instead of Direct Sound (the former is meant to allow the music data to bypass Windows's own sound mixers, which can apparently add distortion). This worked poorly with my HRT DAC, playing with clicks/pops every few seconds. More googling and it turns out that this is a common problem with external asynchronous DACs and WASAPI.

Yet more googling this morning, and I've managed to convince myself that any distortion through Direct Sound will not be audible, so I'm going to stick with that, although it is a bit annoying that between them Microsoft, media player makers and audiophile DAC makers have not figured out a reliable way to communicate, unaltered, a music file to a DAC (if the Direct Sound distortion issue is real).

If anyone has solved similar issues with WASAPI and external DACs I'd be interested to hear about it.
 

steve_1979

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I mostly use Windows Media Player because I like the user interface. I also have foobar installed but it doesn't get used very often. iTunes is ok too but it's my least preferred of the three media players.
 

cheeseboy

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Jame5 said:
All was good with Musicbee until I tried to use WASAPI instead of Direct Sound (the former is meant to allow the music data to bypass Windows's own sound mixers, which can apparently add distortion). This worked poorly with my HRT DAC, playing with clicks/pops every few seconds. More googling and it turns out that this is a common problem with external asynchronous DACs and WASAPI.

Yet more googling this morning, and I've managed to convince myself that any distortion through Direct Sound will not be audible, so I'm going to stick with that, although it is a bit annoying that between them Microsoft, media player makers and audiophile DAC makers have not figured out a reliable way to communicate, unaltered, a music file to a DAC (if the Direct Sound distortion issue is real).

If anyone has solved similar issues with WASAPI and external DACs I'd be interested to hear about it.

try foobar with wasapi, see if it does the same. No need to scan libraries or anything, just install, select the output to wasapi and try one track.

At least that way you can try and rule out if it's the playback software or not.

You could also try running a linux live cd/usb stick, see if that produces the same issues, to see if it's something in your windows set up or not.

I have had it in the past with certain soundcards and certain motherboard combinations just not working together nicely. It's quite rare but it does happen, and in those cases the only option was to change one or another :(
 

pauln

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Jame5 said:
All was good with Musicbee until I tried to use WASAPI instead of Direct Sound (the former is meant to allow the music data to bypass Windows's own sound mixers, which can apparently add distortion). This worked poorly with my HRT DAC, playing with clicks/pops every few seconds. More googling and it turns out that this is a common problem with external asynchronous DACs and WASAPI.

Yet more googling this morning, and I've managed to convince myself that any distortion through Direct Sound will not be audible, so I'm going to stick with that, although it is a bit annoying that between them Microsoft, media player makers and audiophile DAC makers have not figured out a reliable way to communicate, unaltered, a music file to a DAC (if the Direct Sound distortion issue is real).

If anyone has solved similar issues with WASAPI and external DACs I'd be interested to hear about it.

I don't know if you found this: http://wiki.hydrogenaudio.org/index.php?title=Bypassing_Windows_Mixer

Seems to suggest there is little or nothing to be gained in sound quality when bypassing direct sound. I seem to recall that in Win 7 it was 'unmolested' anyway.

For what its worth, I use Foobar > wasapi event > ODAC. Apparently wasapi event is more compatible with USB devices than wasapi push. I can't hear any difference between wasapi and DS, one advantage is that the media player mutes all other applications and sounds. Downside to that is that you have to close the mediaplayer if you want sound on Skype, you tube or anything at all really.
 

fr0g

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Jame5 said:
Thanks very much for all the helpful comments. After a little googling, I went for Musicbee. I thought I should try one of the free options. Wonderfully, this did a five minute search of my hard drive and found all (I think) of my music (something that I couldn't get iTunes to do). Thanks Drummerman!

I response to the question above (major fubar?) about what I did to the file structure, I tried to create a separate library of MP3s for use on my android OS phone. When I selected the old library again iTunes couldn't find the files (which I think were still where it had put them in the first place). I'm sure that I could have done something to prevent this, but the iTunes's apparent inabiliity to re-find the files where it put them really annoyed me, hence the uninstall.

All was good with Musicbee until I tried to use WASAPI instead of Direct Sound (the former is meant to allow the music data to bypass Windows's own sound mixers, which can apparently add distortion). This worked poorly with my HRT DAC, playing with clicks/pops every few seconds. More googling and it turns out that this is a common problem with external asynchronous DACs and WASAPI.

Yet more googling this morning, and I've managed to convince myself that any distortion through Direct Sound will not be audible, so I'm going to stick with that, although it is a bit annoying that between them Microsoft, media player makers and audiophile DAC makers have not figured out a reliable way to communicate, unaltered, a music file to a DAC (if the Direct Sound distortion issue is real).

If anyone has solved similar issues with WASAPI and external DACs I'd be interested to hear about it.

If you disable system sounds in the control panel for audio, then you don't need to do anything. The only time Windows may mess with the sound is when multiple apps are playing sound.
 

Alec

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steve_1979 said:
I mostly use Windows Media Player because I like the user interface. I also have foobar installed but it doesn't get used very often. iTunes is ok too but it's my least preferred of the three media players.

It seems to have had a field day with some of my album art recently (one of REM's album covers appears to be looking to achieve world domination), and I'm sure some of those songs were ripped with poweramp. It also doesn't recognise most my Lee Harvey Oswald Band songs, for some reason. It puts them under "unknown".

And yet, like you, I like the interface.
 

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