iTunes advice

[Carl Edlund Anderson]

On 08 Jul 2013, at 21:09 , Jonathan Smith <smithjm77x7 at GMAIL.COM> wrote:
> 
> I like Apple computers for music, but I hate the way iTunes takes over and
> the Apple Store keeps popping up. I dislike the way iTunes doesn't play
> FLAC files, although I believe you can make it do that if you try. If you
> listen to headphones there is software that sounds better too and plays all
> formats.

Hmm, the iTunes Store never "pops up" for me, but it is possible that I turned such a feature off long ago. 

The lack of support for FLAC _is_ more annoying; that's surely just Apple pushing people towards ALAC, which presumably they intend to sell via iTMS someday. You _can_ kludge iTunes into playing FLACs, but I always found it a bit tedious and have given up bothering. I've become accustomed to converting FLACs to ALAC with XLD, though that involves a certain amount of tedium as well. 

Unfortunately, I don't have a listening environment that would probably make better reproduction noticeable. :P In fact, virtually all of my listening involves slurping things out of iTunes and into my phone, so I can listen to AACs through the car stereo while driving! I am trying to imagine a life in which I might actually have time to justify sitting down and listening to 30-60 minutes of music in the house ... but such a life seems sufficiently far away that the available technology may have changed significantly by then.

Actually, the biggest annoyance with iTunes for me is that my library is too large for the iTunes Match service! It would be nice to be able to call up anything (with, albeit, a bit of a wait while it downloads).  Andy Gilham (ex of BOC-L) has that, but the wi-fi in his flat is too dodgy to make it work seamlessly, while he also lacks a local mobile phone plan, which prevents it from working away from his flat (unless he's somewhere with free wi-fi, of which there are admittedly lots of places). But I have good in-house wi-fi and lots of unused data allowance on my mobile phone plan, so it would work quite well for me -- IF I didn't already exceed the library size limit by more than 15k songs.

I feel, in any case, like we are very much in the infancy of digital A/V entertainment still. People are trying to work out how to sell, store, distribute, etc. audio and video entertainment. What things do people feel like buying outright, and one things do they want to rent or subscribe to? How does it work in your house, when your walking or driving around, traveling, etc.?  Really, the attempts to deal with all this so far are fairly primitive.  The very fact that we're sitting here talking about "How can we sensibly play digital audio in our houses?" shows how primitive it is! ;)

Cheers,
Carl  

--
Carl Edlund Anderson
http://www.carlaz.com/