Oh, for the love of Cthulhu's pink fluffy bunny slippers...

[sessifet]

Right. Remember Tiny, the newest addition to my (small) collection of Shiny Things(TM)?

Well, Tiny is wonderful. He does what it says on the tin. Unfortunately, Tiny can only be used with iTunes.

First up, iTunes keeps nagging me to register Tiny. Well, I don't want to register Tiny. I'm not going to get his pedigree because frankly, I'm not planning on breeding him. Besides, I am happy with Tiny. I won't be persuaded to buy other Tiny Shinies. And I don't really want to have to look at new offers every day, thank you.

Second up, the absolutely ludicrous music management.

Step 1: Create a library.
Step 2: Populate Tiny from said library.

Not too bad if you want to keep the same playlist for yonks. I don't. I get bored, so I remove songs and re-add songs and that's where iTunes starts sucking like a convict at the crack of the gas chamber door.

Get this: I can delete tracks from Tiny directly, but I can't add tracks to Tiny directly. I need to use the library. Now, that's an arse backwards way of going about it, in my opinion.

It gets worse, though: While I can remove tracks from Tiny without this affecting the library (makes sense), I can't delete files from my library without it directly affecting Tiny. Which means I've just deleted the playlist I'd been so carefully pruning on Tiny, because I was silly enough to delete the library. This makes no sense! Who the hell thought of that?

*stalks off muttering to herself*

---

*stalks back*

Also, I have indeed been informed not to use the phrase 'terminated with extreme prejudice' when writing an incident ticket. Maybe I shouldn't have asked before doing it.

Comments

[spooforbrains.livejournal.com]

I also have a Tiny Shiny, which I love. iTunes has never been anywhere near my laptop (which, anyway, is running Linux). There are a number of fine music managers that are infinitely less stupid than iTunes for you to use.

See this list. I use a combination of Amarok and gtkpod, but if you run Windows or MacOS this is probably not an option. I recommend floola in that case.

[sessifet25.livejournal.com]

That's great, thanks! I have a laptop that runs Linux, so I have some choice. and I'll definitely give floola a try, seeing as You Bastard is the hub of my music stuff, and You Bastard runs XP. :)

[spooforbrains.livejournal.com]

Floola is not compatible with libgpod-based apps like Amarok or gtkpod, though. Which is annoying because I'd quite like to use it but my main machine(s) run Linux.

The nice thing about Floola is that you can have it sat on the ipod itself, so you can use it on any machine you plug your ipod into without installing it.

[cold-company.livejournal.com]

iTunes uses a "synchronise" function to keep the player and the mobile device the same as each other, if you turn this off it won't automatically update your Tiny when you plug it in. Just plug it in and when the screen for the Tiny comes up check "manually manage music". If you get any new music you'll have to add it to Tiny manually (click/drag) but I find it's a small price to pay for iTunes not messing with my playlists every time I plug my iPod in.

[swaldman.livejournal.com]

Winamp works with Arwen's not-quite-so-tiny. It has the unfortunate side-effect of crashing whenever you disconnect it, but I'm sure that's solvable;-)

It also has the nifty button that says "Fill my mp3 player". It does what it says on the tin, at random, and then keeps track so that it fills it with all-different stuff the next time.