Tricks to Make iTunes More Useful
ITunes isn’t likely to win any awards from the music/geek set. While Apple’s music player has the average users’ needs covered, advanced users and music hounds frequently moan about the lack of control iTunes offers over one’s library, the need to manually add songs, the lack of web features or the significant resource hit it causes on your system.
Of course, like many of you, we run iTunes to sync music, apps and more with our iPhones. There are several alternatives that can handle iPods, but not many that work with the iPhone.
So, since many of us are stuck with iTunes, there are a few things you can do to make it behave a little better. Pulling from our previous list of the top ten things that suck about iTunes, here are a few fixes for the top complaints in our survey:
- iTunes is a massive resource hog — Sorry, can’t help with this one.
- It’s very difficult to remove duplicate tracks — Some possibilities here include plugins like iDupe or Dupin. Be careful with these, though. They aren’t so great at recognizing, for instance, that a live version of a song is not a duplicate.
- iTunes has a nasty habit of trying to install other apps on your Windows machine — This one is really annoying, and there isn’t much you can do, save read the dialogs carefully whenever you update.
- There’s no way to get music off your iPod — It’s annoying that iTunes can’t do it, but there are plenty of other apps that can. Check out our review of iPod music copying apps (Podworks is a personal favorite).
- The library manager enforces its own organization system — You can minimize the damage by heading to Preferences > Advanced and deselecting the “Keep iTunes Music folder Organized” option.
- Need to manually add songs — It isn’t quite as nice as things would be if iTunes would just watch a folder for new music, but there is a script available which you can use to add music automatically. The script needs to be attached to a folder via Folder Actions, but once that’s done, any time you drop a music file into that folder, it will open iTunes and import the track. If anyone knows of something similar for Windows, let us know.
- iTunes is bad at finding cover art — Try Album Art Thingy. It isn’t perfect, but it found a few things iTunes didn’t in my testing.
- iTunes can’t play Flac, Ogg and other music file formats — iTunes can play anything QuickTime can play, so you need to grab the QuickTime Flac and Ogg plugins. We’ve had issues with both plugins in the past, but more recent version are much improved.
Obviously, some of the bigger complaints don’t have solutions. But since, at least for now, we’re stuck with iTunes, hopefully these fixes will go a little way toward making your iTunes experience more pleasant.
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