iPod Touch 4g - Music importing

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Pringals

Gawd
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Nov 27, 2004
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I will be receiving my first apple product tomorrow, a new Ipod Touch 4g 32mb (xmas gift to self). So tonight I thought I would get prepared and install iTunes (boo booo) and start setting up itunes for my first sync. First impression, I HATE iTunes! ... WTF? This thing has been around long enough I thought it would be more refined by now. (MediaMonkey FTW!) I'm probably going to look deeper into the itunes/ipod plugins available for MediaMonkey, but first, I'm going to give the itunes a chance.

... Anyway, my issue right now is settings for my music. For the last 10+ years, I've been just using Windows Media Player to rip my music in wma format. My Sansa music players never had a problem with that, but iTunes obviously doesn't like wma. So what would you recommend me to set the settings for importing my music to iTunes? m4a or mp3, other? Quality settings? Bit rate? I don't have the "audiophile" ear, but I also don't want my sounds to sound like shit whether I'm cranking on my Atlantic Technology home theater speakers or using some $20 ear-buds on the go. I'm thinking of just doing the typical mp3 at 128kbs, but if any of you have better suggestions, I'd love to hear them.

Also, wtf is it with iTunes and album art? I only did 5 test albums and only 2 of them had the album art after going through the "get album art" crap. I already found and manually tied album art to all my music with mediamonkey. I really don't want to spend all the time doing it again for iTunes. (+/- 6500 songs)

Thanks for any tips or advice!
 
Pringals said:
... Anyway, my issue right now is settings for my music. For the last 10+ years, I've been just using Windows Media Player to rip my music in wma format. My Sansa music players never had a problem with that, but iTunes obviously doesn't like wma. So what would you recommend me to set the settings for importing my music to iTunes? m4a or mp3, other? Quality settings? Bit rate? I don't have the "audiophile" ear, but I also don't want my sounds to sound like shit whether I'm cranking on my Atlantic Technology home theater speakers or using some $20 ear-buds on the go. I'm thinking of just doing the typical mp3 at 128kbs, but if any of you have better suggestions, I'd love to hear them.
Click to expand...

AAC at 128Kbps is the default setting, and it’s fine for most purposes. You can import using the Apple Lossless encoder, and then tick the option at the iPod sync menu to convert to 128Kbps AAC when syncing, if you’re anal about it.

Also, wtf is it with iTunes and album art? I only did 5 test albums and only 2 of them had the album art after going through the "get album art" crap. I already found and manually tied album art to all my music with mediamonkey. I really don't want to spend all the time doing it again for iTunes. (+/- 6500 songs)
Click to expand...

iTunes will have the album art of albums it offers. If they don’t have the rights to something, they can’t send it to you, so not every album is going to have art associated with it on Apple’s side. Just make sure your tags are in order, specifically track/disc numbers, Artist, and Album Artist, and you’ll be okay.

Most of your complaints have to do with learning a new method to accomplish a given task. You’ll be fine once you adjust.
 
Thanks for the reply Terpfen. I've gotten similar replys in another forum.

I guess iTunes really isn't all that bad. I just expected so much more out of it with the time it has had to mature and develop... especially with all the ipod/iphone/ipad hype over the years.
 
There is a bit of a learning curve to iTunes but I finally got to the point where I can use it rather well. Most of my stuff was already mp3 at 200-300kbps so I didn't have to rerip anything. My tags were already well done with lots of work so they came across well but the album art does annoy me a bit, maybe i will fix in the future. My friends were dabbling in lossless and had nothing but problems like you had with wma, just go the easy way and do a high bitrate mp3 is so much easier.
 
It's Apple, if you follow their rules it works all nice and fluffy like...

Personally I'd stick with 192 kbps or better mp3's. Seem to be the most widely used format and 192 is roughly where I can notice a delta in quality.

For album art... it's finicky (IMO), if you match the metadata with what iTunes knows, it'll grab stuff. Otherwise you can get an image of the album artwork from wherever, select the album in iTunes, go to 'info' and on the bottom-right, check the 'artwork' box and just drag the image to that area (a + should appear).
 
yea, that's basically what I already did with MediaMonkey, manually attached album art to the random songs that needed it ... I'm really not looking forward to doing it again on iTunes, but if i'm going to do it, this is the time of year to do it. Bring on the rain/snow!
 
personally the ipod touch after 3.1.3 has become more of a gaming device rather than music player, the system for music itself is all screwed up. for example on old version you can easily select an album and play songs in their track order, now it's all alphabetical and no more easy album selection. means i'll have to rename the tags and stuff all over again. and for this mistake/feature i want to freaking shoot my ipod only problem for me $300 (what i paid) is too much money.

i also had to do some album art manually from third party website, but next time i put the music in the album art is gone. so good luck with yours.
 
MP3Tag will work well for putting album art on your files. It'll be hardcoded into the file so you should be able to take it to any media player and have your album art right there without needing to do anything.
 
If your music is tagged right then iTunes does a good job of getting album art. It grabs about 90% of my ~300 or so albums.
 
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