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My wife bought me a shiny new iPod classic this summer to replace a worn out Zune... for the most part it does the job - I have no complaints with the device itself. But iTunes is driving me crazy.

Some background: I have maybe around 6000+ songs, and about half of them are ripped from CD's that I own, originally in WMA format. So of course, when I got the iPod one of the first things I had to do was convert all of those songs. I don't mind that - it took a while, but it wasn't unexpected.

The other night I noticed that a few of my albums were under the wrong artist; no biggie, I figured I'd just fix the tags and sync them up. Here is what happened instead... for some reason, it deleted all of the songs on my iPod and in my library that had been converted. Deleted as in removed the files from my HDD. Fortunately I have backups, but still... WTF?

So I am wondering if anyone here knows of a good alternative to iTunes... I know they're out there. Basically I want to be able to get music onto the iPod, and edit the album information. And I'd prefer that it not randomly delete things...

Foobar2000 has an iPod manager plugin that should let it sync your iPod. I haven't used that plugin personally, but I absolutely love FB2k for its customizability and format support.

Damn... and here I was thinking about finally using iTunes for the first time, since they have a few things I'd like to get that don't seem to be available anywhere else. Hearing about BS like this makes me want to continue avoiding all things Apple like the plague.

If you decide to use iTunes, you can't go around messing with the files inside the library.
Just like you don't whip out your hex editor to fix PowerPoint presentations.

Make all changes using iTunes and everything will just work.

"Make all changes using iTunes and everything will just work."

Ha! I wish that were true. Then I could have two days of my life back!

I received a 6th gen iPod Nano for Christmas 2011. I spent almost the entire weekend trying to get iTunes to correctly import and convert my MWA encoded Media Player library. It never worked right: songs mis-filed, album artwork corrupted, all sorts of glitches. I did everything I could to try and make the Media Player library pristine, so that iTunes would import correctly. I ended up re-ripping everything from CD.

And then, to rub it, in iTunes refused to download artwork for the albums I had just ripped, unless I gave it my credit card number. Are you kidding me?

As it turns out, there was a "secret" work around to get an iTunes account, and thereby the album artwork, without a credit card. And iTunes is less bad now than it was in 2010, but it's still not good. I often have to hand feed it track descriptions and album art, and the navigation and search are still ridiculously bad for a company with Apple's resources.

I'm no Apple hater, but iTunes has been, and continues to be, an embarrassment to them.

windwalker wrote:

If you decide to use iTunes, you can't go around messing with the files inside the library.
Just like you don't whip out your hex editor to fix PowerPoint presentations.

Make all changes using iTunes and everything will just work.

The only manual changes I made to my library were:

1) I manually dragged the folders that contained .wma files onto the iTunes application, so that it would import them; it converted them to .m4a files. Because for some reason, it didn't import them when I initially imported the library, despite them being in the same folder structure as all my other (.mp3) files. Once that was complete, each of those folders contained both .wma and .m4a files.

2) I deleted the .wma files from the library; I don't need two copies of each song on my local HDD.

After doing those two things, I didn't touch my library from the file system. It was that way for nearly three months - all that importing was done in early July - and there was no problem. I added a few albums since that time, they went in just fine.

The other night, I noticed that a few albums were under the wrong artist; so I went into iTunes and modified the artist name for those albums and clicked sync, expecting the result would be that iTunes would update the artist for those albums on my iPod. Instead, for some reason, what iTunes did was remove every last song that was originally .wma from my library and from my iPod. It physically deleted the .m4a files from my HDD.

There is no logical reason for iTunes to have interpreted me pressing the sync button as meaning delete half my library because the files were converted from another format; especially not three months after the fact. I didn't delete those files; they're in both the backup I took in July, and in a backup I took very recently. There were several syncs between then and the other night, and none of those deleted anything. So why now?

So please, spare me the "it just works" bulls**t.