Windows Media Ply & itunes

[audiobill]

Just got high speed internet today. Hoooooray!! 7years of dial-up is history.

Silly question: Can I organize music files from windows media player into itunes??

I downloaded itunes for free from the apple site.

I like the way it looks better than media player.

Please, help.

Please PM if the info is confidential or something.


Thanks-a-ton,

Bill

[MindGoneHaywire]

Wow, have I been dying to put up a post about Dell's Musicmatch Jukebox (at least I think it's a Dell product) vs. ITunes. I think it's pretty easy to drag & drop stuff from WMP into ITunes; I've done it from Windows where I keep my MP3s (on a 200 gb external hd). Musicmatch's last software update introduced the novel concept of not being able to identify individual artists on compilations: anything like a movie soundtrack or a comp from someone on this board or a commercial comp, it all goes under "Various Artists." Sorry, that doesn't work for me & I think it's the stupidest thing of all time. I wrote to 'em when they changed it & they didn't care. I've had ITunes for a year but never used it as much of a player until recently. I had to pick up a laptop so I have ITunes as the default player on that & uninstalled Musicmatch so I'd be forced to learn how to use it. Great stuff, & the radio stations are a nice bonus also. I'm probably not going to bother loading ITunes on my desktop with 150gb worth of my music collection (which has grown a lot in the past year in MP3s if not in physical discs & no, I do not download from file-sharers like Kazaa), but all the comps I had on Musicmatch with the ridiculous 'Various Artists' blanket info is now in ITunes along with some other things. There may be an aspect or two of Musicmatch that I still prefer, but, by & large, I think ITunes has 'em beat by a mile. I would've gone with it exclusively from the time I upgraded my desktop, had I known. I did go with Musicmatch over WMP when I first upgraded, can't remember why, it probably had something to with the interface or skins or something. I actually had been looking forward to being able to use WMP after having seen it on an ME machine; I had 98 & playing MP3s on it was something that required a lot of patience.

I imagine Musicmatch offered a feature where you could rip a CD into a custom playlist, but I was too dim to realize that possibility until I started ripping to ITunes a few weeks ago. I suppose if I'd known how to do that it would've made MM a little more user-friendly for me...but it's become clunky as hell & takes over anything else I'm running if I play a CD it doesn't recognize. I hate it when software does that unless it's an antivirus program or something similarly important. I don't want a CD player playing something & demanding info on what it is so I can't stop it until I respond & can't hide the program as it intrudes on whatever the hell I was doing. It was very, uh, elephant-like, very clumsy, super-annoying, to the point where I disabled MM as the default player for CDs. What a pain in the butt, every time I put a CD in that it didn't have a perfect fit for in its database, and I couldn't stop it from playing until I went through at least a couple of fairly slow screens. It shouldn't surprise me that Apple can come up with even Windows-based software that works better than programs that are wholly Windows-based, but let's just say it was good to find that it was a better program.

High speed access saved my old computer & extended its life by probably 3 years; it's a great thing. Enjoy & good luck!

[audiobill]

Wow, have I been dying to put up a post about Dell's Musicmatch Jukebox (at least I think it's a Dell product) vs. ITunes. I think it's pretty easy to drag & drop stuff from WMP into ITunes; I've done it from Windows where I keep my MP3s (on a 200 gb external hd). Musicmatch's last software update introduced the novel concept of not being able to identify individual artists on compilations: anything like a movie soundtrack or a comp from someone on this board or a commercial comp, it all goes under "Various Artists." Sorry, that doesn't work for me & I think it's the stupidest thing of all time. I have ITunes as the default player on that & uninstalled Musicmatch so I'd be forced to learn how to use it. .

High speed access saved my old computer & extended its life by probably 3 years; it's a great thing. Enjoy & good luck!

Thanks for all the useful info, mindgonehaywire.

In fact, I'm going a little haywire with Musicmatch. I'll play with both, today, and see which comes out the victor.

I'm not having much luck clicking and dragging from one to the other. :(

[DariusNYC]

iTunes has a feature, at least on the Mac, where it can find all the music on your hard drive and automatically put it in iTunes. 2 things about this though: First, there is a setting, I think it's in Advanced Preferences (typing from work so I can't check), to select whether, when you put a tune into iTunes, you copy the file or just index it in iTunes. You want to make sure you're not copying a music file when you transfer it to iTunes, because this takes up extra memory of course. Second, I don't think iTunes can read Windows Media files, but if your music is in MP3s or AACs or Apple's format of course it works just fine.

This is based on transfering a bunch of music two years ago, so the latest versions of the program may be a little different. Also, like I said, maybe the PC version is different from the Mac version.