WWDC 2014 Keynote

[s44]

Online tagging is useless and wrong if you don't just listen to pop music.

 

[cronos]

It's fine if you don't like iTunes, but I never quite get why some people get a kick out of spending hours meticulously organizing their music collections into folders, editing ID3 tags and the like... me, I'd rather just lump them into an app or cloud service and let it do the hard work.

Well for me, it's because I listen to music one album at the time, not playlists that include tracks from different albums. So it's really important to me that the content of my music library are all properly tagged.

I don't understand your first statement though, because I did all the above and organized my music in iTunes. Ripped my CDs with iTunes-lame, and I let iTunes do the folder-ing.

 

[mosco]

Do any of you develop apps? Just curious about your take on the Swift announcement. I don't really understand the potential there but sounds like it was received well at the conference.

The Swift sessions have been packed, with even the Apple employee lines being really long. I think people are really excited.

I have gone to all the Swift sessions, and I know I am pretty excited. I am one of those people that actually liked Objective-C, but so far I do think that Swift is better. I have heard a lot of non-ios/mac developers mention how they might get into it now that they don't need to learn objective-c, but they will probably still be disappointed that there is no garbage collection.

Apple really outdid themselves this year for developers. In terms of development, I already thought it was better than Android (except for provisioning etc) but I think they now have an ever greater lead if you consider quality of tooling, language, etc.

It should be really interesting to see what Google comes out with Google I/O, because Java on Android is looking long in the tooth and Android studio still isn't ready for primetime.

 

[ControlD]

Well for me, it's because I listen to music one album at the time, not playlists that include tracks from different albums. So it's really important to me that the content of my music library are all properly tagged.

I don't understand your first statement though, because I did all the above and organized my music in iTunes. Ripped my CDs with iTunes-lame, and I let iTunes do the folder-ing.

I am exactly the same. I generally listen to my music an album at a time, not a track at a time. I have spent a long time organizing my library exactly how I want it and I know how I want to move that music to my devices. Even when I was using an iPhone I simply manually managed my media and used drag and drop in itunes to transfer music. In that case iTunes was completely extraneous but I was forced to use it. I feel the same about using the cloud. I simply don't need it and in the end it requires extra steps that don't fit into the way that I like to do things. People that prefer the cloud aren't wrong in any way, they just prefer to do things differently.

This is the bigger point illustrated by people arguing over media management and the reason I left the Apple world. Give me, the user and the one that spent good money on the device, the option to use the device as I want to. That is where I feel the biggest failing has been on Apple's part. The phone itself was just fine, but the artificial restrictions placed on my usage of it got me to change platforms. It seems like Apple is starting to loosen the chains a little bit and that's great. If they go just another step or two I think people like me might see them as a real viable and even attractive alternative.

 

[Commodus]

Well for me, it's because I listen to music one album at the time, not playlists that include tracks from different albums. So it's really important to me that the content of my music library are all properly tagged.

I don't understand your first statement though, because I did all the above and organized my music in iTunes. Ripped my CDs with iTunes-lame, and I let iTunes do the folder-ing.

In my experience, many of those who insist on drag-and-drop for music and videos avoid iTunes (and even other sync-capable apps, like DoubleTwist) either as much as possible or altogether. They have to have absolute control, even if they're actually worse off in practice. You're a bit half-and-half!

This wouldn't be so much of an issue if Apple allowed other devices to directly sync with iTunes, I suppose. I just find it extremely handy when you have to be out the door in ten minutes and your iPhone has already synced the new album you bought, the podcast you didn't finish playing, five updated apps and a video.

 

[Mopetar]

But the fact that I'm uploading stuff to the cloud seems to open this up for some form of inspection by the powers that be and I'm not sure what I got where (there's some 1GB+ of it). So I like to think that no one cares if I'm using on my own device but if I clouded it then I might get some letter in the future saying "we did a search of your library, matched them to known songs on Napster, and you owe $45 million for these 12 songs that you got from Napster 12 years ago".

I think most of the cloud music services just get your meta-data (song name, artist, album) in order to match to some version of the file that they have. It's a lot easier for them to serve the same version of Freebird to users than to store thousands of slightly different copies that might exist in varying formats, quality, etc.

Unless they decide to determine the legality at that point, or store some information about the files you loaded beyond whatever data they need to make sure the correct file is delivered, it would seem to be difficult to later analyze your music collection to make such a determination.

That said throwing out the Napster files might not be a bad idea, but probably because the quality is so much worse than what you could expect to get these days. Storage is good enough that unless you have a truly monstrous collection of music, there's no reason to have 128 kbit/s (or less!) bitrate MP3 files.

 

[AznAnarchy99]

I think most of the cloud music services just get your meta-data (song name, artist, album) in order to match to some version of the file that they have. It's a lot easier for them to serve the same version of Freebird to users than to store thousands of slightly different copies that might exist in varying formats, quality, etc.

Unless they decide to determine the legality at that point, or store some information about the files you loaded beyond whatever data they need to make sure the correct file is delivered, it would seem to be difficult to later analyze your music collection to make such a determination.

That said throwing out the Napster files might not be a bad idea, but probably because the quality is so much worse than what you could expect to get these days. Storage is good enough that unless you have a truly monstrous collection of music, there's no reason to have 128 kbit/s (or less!) bitrate MP3 files.

Google will provide you a higher quality version of your track.

 

[TreVader]

Do people still use iTunes? I just use spotify. No reason to spend an extra $200 on 64GB of flash memory when I can just stream over unlimited 4G

 

[AznAnarchy99]

Do people still use iTunes? I just use spotify. No reason to spend an extra $200 on 64GB of flash memory when I can just stream over unlimited 4G

A lot of people don't have unlimited internet. I have my Google All Access with T-Mobile unlimited. I haven't put songs on my phone in a long time, even when I had my drag/drop Android.

 

[TreVader]

Android was actually frustrating for me to transfer music to because of the 4GB limit. Without using console to push you have to put it in 4000MB at a time

 

[ControlD]

Android was actually frustrating for me to transfer music to because of the 4GB limit. Without using console to push you have to put it in 4000MB at a time

That sounds more like a FAT32 problem (probably what your SD card or internal storage was formatted to) than an Android problem.

 

[TreVader]

That sounds more like a FAT32 problem (probably what your SD card or internal storage was formatted to) than an Android problem.

Can you format NTFS in android?

 

[ControlD]

Can you format NTFS in android?

I don't think so, but you can use exFAT (and probably ext2/ext3 as well, not positive about that). It could very well be that some of those weren't supported when you were using an Android device however.

 

[vi edit]

Fat32 has a file size limit of 4 gig, not a volume limit of it. Not sure what restriction you were seeing at 4 gig unless it was one giant zip file of data or something.

 

[Zaap]

Fat32 has a file size limit of 4 gig, not a volume limit of it. Not sure what restriction you were seeing at 4 gig unless it was one giant zip file of data or something.

Yeah I'm not getting this either. There's no 4GB file limit with individual smaller files and FAT32,( which pretty much any music collection would be) just single files larger than that.