iTunes or inport?
 

I have inported many cds into my computer. There have been occasions where the tracks are seperated into addition/seperate albums. In the frustration of renaming tracks/albums I find it more less stressful to just buy the album on iTunes. Not only do I alleviate the problem with track names but also not having to search for album artwork, however, there has been certain times where Itunes has the incorrect artwork.

I don't know what it's like overthere but overhere downloading the album is completely legal if you own the original one. So you don't even HAVE to buy them, you can just download them. I have most of my music on vinyl and recording every track to the PC would take a lot of time, so I just downloaded everything, completely legal :)

I say uninstall iTunes, getting rid of it was one of the wisest decisions I've made. There's far better media players out there than iTunes such as Winamp, foobar2000 and Media Monkey that let you manage your media library a lot better. I've had those problems with iTunes you've mentioned and to be honest it's just better to rename tracks and albums manually even though it's time consuming. iTunes never gets everything right.

Winamp does do quite a great job finding the titles to the tracks :).
But i guess all these programs use the same Gracenote Database.

Do not talk to me about itunes. I mistakenly updated the latest version and spent a day and a half trying to get a mere 20 gigs of music onto my ipod touch.

I have music that shows up in the album section but not the artist section. Some albums have been put on three times and some are listed but have no files. If you have a band for example Sharon Jones and the Dap Kings, it won't recognise the album if it comes up with '&' instead of 'and'. Surely they have the software to recognise them as the same thing? Many albums missing track one and put into a separate album and the amount of times I have added artwork, correct tags, profiles etc only to find that what's in my itunes folder doesn't end up on my ipod.

Considering it is supposed to be this all encompassing database of music it is seriously flawed and even if you have one track with a space before the bands name it won't put it into the same album. HATE HATE HATE. I can't get on with mediamonkey either so that's a no no for me.

The only major problem I've found with itunes is that when you have multiple albums with the same title (f.ex: Dalek's Absence, Snowman's Absence, and Paper Route's Absence), it will group them all together in your coverflow, so that playing one inevitably plays them all.

I wish I was geeky enough to grasp foobar and really make the most of it.

EDIT: To be fair, I use itunes for the sole purpose of syncing my ipod with the music I have purchased.

I had major problems with iTunes when I was using it on a PC, and I found that with each new version of iTunes, it became more difficult to use with a PC.

I bought a mac book for the sole purpose of managing my music collection on iTunes, and all my problems went away. I uploaded all the CD's that I currently had and I now purchase most of my music on iTunes. I have not had any of the problems mentioned in the previous posts. You can import whatever artwork you want, you can re-name albums or songs to arrange them anyway you want, and in terms of albums where the songs are indexed but should all run together you can choose zero gap in between songs when you import them. Plus, you can import your CD's and downloads using the loss-less option, so the sound quality is great. I hated ITunes for a while, but now I'm a huge proponent. I also have Apple TV, which streams your music collection through your TV making it into a virtual jukebox for a party. One trick on organizing your collection is to select the album icon view (not cover-flow) from there, you can choose to arrange by three parameters. I go by artist, album, year, and it works perfect; then I switch back to cover flow and it maintains the order.

The only thing I miss is the tangible aspect of a CD or album, so I've started collecting used records again from a local record store that sells a ton of used records all for a dollar.

I have this exact same problem. I restored my Touch yesterday and it's fine now, but I know that the minute I add a new artist, the alphabetical ordering will be way out of wack.

There's a trick to the ordering. You can't be in the cover flow view. I'm traveling and don't have my iTunes in front of me, but I think you have to choose the album icon view, then you can arrange by multiple parameters and choose the order: Artist, album, year, etc. in any order you want. Then you can switch back to cover flow.

If you Google search it, there are good instructions.

Why is everyone buying i-devices if iTunes is such a pain in the ass?