I feel stupid.
I bought myself a 30-GB iPod a few months ago, because, although I already had a 512 MB flash mp3 player (an iRiver --- the iFP 895 --- and a lovely little thing it is), I wanted to have my *entire* music collection with me wherever I went. And out of the various hard-drive players out there, the iPod did seem like the best one. The only problem was: I didn't really like iTunes at all (and iTunes, as you're probably aware, is the only way to get music onto an iPod). I've been a devoted WinAmp fan ever since I discovered mp3, all the way back in 1997, and over the years I've developed my own method of organizing my mp3 collection on my hard drive --- filename conventions, folder arrangements, etc. And WinAmp doesn't interfere with any of that. iTunes, on the other hand, prefers to do things its own way. Thankfully, it gives you the option to not copy/move all of your mp3s into its library folder and to not re-arrange everything into its Artist\Album\Songname directory structure.
Anyway. There are other beefs that I have with iTunes, but those aren't the subject of this post. I feel like an idiot because I spent these past few months mostly *not* using my iPod because I couldn't figure out a way to import my WinAmp-generated playlists into iTunes. I like having all my music with me, and I like listening to my entire collection in random order, but in certain situations, like when I'm driving, I only want to hear the songs that I've set aside into my special for-driving playlist. (Obviously.) Hitting the "next" button on my iPod repeatedly is annoying, and depletes the battery unnecessarily. Hence the non-use of the iPod, until I figured out a solution, and the making-do with mp3-CDs and my flash player. Meanwhile, I grew increasingly frustrated at my inability to find a way to convert WinAmp's .m3u (or .pls) playlists into iTunes' .xml format. I scoured the Internet forums. Googled "export winamp playlist to itunes". Found a Winamp plugin that would export my entire library to an xml file, but not individual playlists. Found an iTunes plugin that would export an iTunes playlist to m3u (see a discussion about it here), but that was the opposite of what I wanted. Ranted and raved, and made much ballyhoo about how much iTunes sucked.
Today I found out that iTunes actually does recognize, and can directly read and import, m3u playlists. File > Import > foo.m3u . That's it, that's all. I have no idea why I didn't realize this four months ago. I could swear I must have tried it back then.... didn't I??
Hee-haw.
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11 comments:
hey jason... so we've just got to the stage where we don't assume we can work out how any sufficiently advance piece of tech works just by trying things out/browsing around.
it's great to use search as a convenient shortcut for playing around but we still need to know just what to look for!
Paraphrasing Sir Arthur Charles now, are we? :)
By "trying things out", d'you mean going through the menus and help-text of iTunes itself? If so, I'm pretty sure that I must have done that, which is why I was so surprised that I'd overlooked this feature.
And, by "know just what to look for", d'you mean knowing what would be the correct set of keywords to submit to a search engine?
yep, i did mean trying out all the options yourself first. i'm sure that even 5 years ago you'd have found the option for yourself! today i wouldnt even trust myself to find simple options, and in my view it's just plain, simple laziness.
and yes, knowing what to google is an important skill. it's surprising the kind of junk keywords ppl search for and how many folks dont even use quotes to mark phrases!
Dont use iTunes. There are many other ways, young one.
Winamp 5 has the ability to store your winamp playlists (using media library) to your ipod =P
True, and that's what I use now. :) I think Winamp's iPod-compatibility only came out with version 5.2, though (http://www.winamp.com/player/version-history), and although that had been released at the time that I wrote this post, I was probably still using a pre-5.2 version then.
Fun fact: iTunes no longer supports m3u playlists. I've spent the past 20 minutes looking around the forums for a way. Stumbled here and though "nooo... it can't be so simple". Well.. it's not! Fuck you, Apple.
Agreed - Fuck you apple and your no support for m3u playlists!! Just because Winamp's 10 times the player iTunes is!!!
I just imported an m3u into iTunes. Maybe the method has changed. But you should be able to go to File>Library>Import Playlist and have it work just fine with the latest version of iTunes.
One really annoying thing with Itunes is if you import a playlist, you end up with duplicates in your library... (or at least I do...
many thanks for your advice!
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