wrbuckley's dashboard

While I am motivated to rant, these comments are sure to be useful to others.

I am sick and tired of commercial software that does not live up to its hype.

RealPlayer and iTunes are two good examples. What bothers me most is that I paid for these two pieces of junk (would rather use other terms, but I digress).

I bought iTunes in order to address two problems with RealPlayer. RealPlayer has a habit of loosing track of music files, just deleting them from my computer, such that I must re-rip the CD. RealPlayer also has a real problem with support, such that when you call for support, there is none.

iTunes is not much better. First, I was told, via the iTunes on-line chat/message boards that iTunes keeps track of the music files in its library in such a way that they can be loaded from computer to computer while retaining artist, album, track name information. This is wrong. I have two computers with iTunes installed, but when I instruct iTunes to gain access to the files stored on a distant hard drive (import the tracks), they do not get listed with artist, album, track name information.

Why should a user of the software be required to rip CDs on each machine in which iTunes resides?

One rip should be sufficient for all the computers that I use.

Further, the fact that music is stored in a hierarchical directory structure (music/artist/album/tracks in order of occurrence on the disk - typically with track number associated) by RealPlayer suggests to me that iTunes should be able to import that information by sampling the name of the individual files and directories, so as to leave the user with a reasonable means to select songs to play. As it is, iTunes just adds the files by track name, such that all the first tracks are listed in the library, followed by all the second tracks, followed by all the third tracks, ... and this without album and artist information. Hence, the list is not sortable.

As far as I am concerned, Apple does not deserve any more of my money. Neither does the Real company.

Is SongBird any better?

Sincerely,

William R. Buckley

PS - you can Google my name, in quotes, and learn a lot about me. Look for the paper, Computational Ontogeny.