How Samsung stole Apple's lead

[Super56K]

It's not a problem of using iTunes it's iTunes attempt to take over my PC with it's bloated self if I install it.

Maybe it used to, but in my experience of almost 2 years using iTunes it's not been prone to do that. It also doesn't seem slow, and for most of this year I've been running it on a HP Proliant N40L server with an AMD Turion II processor, 2gb ram, and Windows 7.

 

[Super56K]

Again, that sounds like a failure on the part of iTunes, not anything else.

I use amazon mp3 too. I have basically infinite space on the amazon cloud for my music. I don't drag & drop anything, I just keep all my music available at all times. It's really pretty simple unless you try to involve iTunes.

The Audiogalaxy app is also awesome for your own private hosted music in the 'cloud.' I've become a little evangelical about Audiogalaxy, but it really is a solid cross-platform app for those who don't want to fill their device with music or rely on Amazon/Google/iTunes to stream music they already own.

 

[SlitheryDee]

Again, that sounds like a failure on the part of iTunes, not anything else.

I use amazon mp3 too. I have basically infinite space on the amazon cloud for my music. I don't drag & drop anything, I just keep all my music available at all times. It's really pretty simple unless you try to involve iTunes.

I owned a bunch of music long before amazon's cloud came along. So your solution would be to have me rebuy all that music because android's solution for getting it onto my phone is unintuitive....and you're calling that a failing of itunes. Itunes is what makes it possible to listen to music like I do without buffering times and in generally higher quality regardless of whether I have internet service.

I'll say it again. This would not be a problem if itunes supported android phones. I know how to get music on my phone without itunes, but I've been spoiled by years of owning ipods and being able to intelligently load them with large portions of my library that changed every time I plugged my ipod in. It took a bit of initial setup, but once that was done I could just pop my ipod into the dock connected to my computer. Itunes would start itself up and begin syncing automatically. Any new podcasts would be added, a randomized smart playlist of music would be added, and several artists who's music I wanted all of would be added. If there was a new artist in my collection that I wanted on there, all I needed to do was check a single box in itunes and click sync again.

It was a combination of exactly what I knew I wanted, plus a little something to surprise me from my music collection. All set up in advance and rarely needing attention after that. To do something similar on an android device would mean picking through hundreds of artists and albums on my computer and would probably take considerable amounts of time and attention every single time I wanted to update the music on my device. That is the sole reason why I don't change the music on my android phone very often, and rarely have what I want to listen to on it.

 

[vi edit]

Heh. I haven't put a single song on my iPhone or my wife's for that matter. Hell I think I've hooked it up to iTunes about three times in 18 months of ownership. Once when I first got it to register, a 2nd time to backup before jailbreaking when on iOS 4.something, and a third time when getting iOS 5.

I rent my music now through slacker. Offline caching content is cool.

 

[Chiropteran]

I owned a bunch of music long before amazon's cloud came along. So your solution would be to have me rebuy all that music because android's solution for getting it onto my phone is unintuitive....and you're calling that a failing of itunes. Itunes is what makes it possible to listen to music like I do without buffering times and in generally higher quality regardless of whether I have internet service.

Yes, it sounds like a failing of iTunes. For all the music I owned prior to amazon, it was trivial to upload to the cloud drive. I had my music ripped into mp3 files with tags and in folders sorted by artist and album. It's incredibly easy to upload this music.

If you can't do it easily, and you feel forced to re-buy the same music again, I have to assume it's something iTunes did to your music.

 

[ponyo]

Heh. I haven't put a single song on my iPhone or my wife's for that matter. Hell I think I've hooked it up to iTunes about three times in 18 months of ownership. Once when I first got it to register, a 2nd time to backup before jailbreaking when on iOS 4.something, and a third time when getting iOS 5.

I rent my music now through slacker. Offline caching content is cool.

Sounds like me. I use iTunes when I have to update/restore firmware and for jailbreak. At least now with iOS5, I don't have to use iTunes for firmware updates.

 

[havuk]

I'm thinking about making the switch from my Iphone 4 to the samsung, will I have any problems converting my itunes over? 99% of my music was ripped from my personal cd collection.

 

[Anubis]

Couldn't you use Google music? I never bothered to get it as I don't have much need for it, but a few of my friends who have tried it have good things to say. It might eat a lot of bandwidth to get everything uploaded, but after that you have everything available.

G music is pretty awesome but its not without flaws. most of which ive bitched about a few times. mostly having to do with it reading ID3 tags and not being as smart as i want it. however that being said i have nearly 200GB of music sitting on it and use it without issue.

if you plan on using it your tags have to be flawless or you will be fixing a lot of stuff once its uploaded. and even when perfect it will just ah heck some things up like album art, just randomly not assiging it or giving it the wrong cover, TBH i think it checks what you have against a database and if its not in the DB it just freaks out, i have certian albums that no matter what the tags are Gmusic interperates them wrong. It also wont bread crumb correctly IMO. I have 2 albums with the same name "Go" by 2 different bands "H20" and "Jonsi", google thinks these are the same album. it lists them correctly under the artists but if you go to sort by albums its 1 album with both artists tracks in it

as for draging and dropping onto your phone, im not sure how anyone could call it difficult. its a basic windows function. now if you use itunes and your music is just sitting in a massive folder with no semblence of nameing/taging and you let itunes do it for you then yea its annoying. but thats your fault for letting itunes f everything up for you

 

[Anubis]

Loading music on an Android device is a PITA that the average person cannot do.

no it is not

crtl-c
crtl-v

is not hard

nor is draging and dropping

my 5 year old niece can do it. its a basic computer operation that everyone knows how to do after spending 30 seconds at it

 

[SlitheryDee]

Yes, it sounds like a failing of iTunes. For all the music I owned prior to amazon, it was trivial to upload to the cloud drive. I had my music ripped into mp3 files with tags and in folders sorted by artist and album. It's incredibly easy to upload this music.

If you can't do it easily, and you feel forced to re-buy the same music again, I have to assume it's something iTunes did to your music.

Mine is sorted the same way. Amazon only offers 5 gb of free storage space, and it'll take me an eternity to upload that on my slow ass DSL connection. 5 gbs isn't 1/20th of the space I would need anyway, and paying for storage space that is ultimately an inferior solution to what I've already been using seems stupid to me.

 

[Anubis]

Mine is sorted the same way. Amazon only offers 5 gb of free storage space, and it'll take me an eternity to upload that on my slow ass DSL connection. 5 gbs isn't 1/20th of the space I would need anyway, and paying for storage space that is ultimately an inferior solution to what I've already been using seems stupid to me.

if you need that much space Gmusic is 200GB or 20,000 songs. whichever you hit first

 

[SlitheryDee]

if you need that much space Gmusic is 200GB or 20,000 songs. whichever you hit first

That would do it, but I still have the issue of getting it all uploaded. I have the fastest internet available in my area, but my upload speed is still pitiful. I also regularly travel in areas where I don't get internet on my phone. Once I got everything uploaded it would still be better than what I'm doing now I guess, but it would be a PITA to get to that point.

 

[Chiropteran]

Mine is sorted the same way. Amazon only offers 5 gb of free storage space, and it'll take me an eternity to upload that on my slow ass DSL connection. 5 gbs isn't 1/20th of the space I would need anyway, and paying for storage space that is ultimately an inferior solution to what I've already been using seems stupid to me.

Huh, I have 20Gb of space with unlimited space for music for free, I thought everyone got in on that deal.

I'm not sure why you think it's inferior though. Have access to all your songs > rotating your songs every day, isn't it?

 

[Anubis]

Yea even with non crap internet it does take forever to upload, i just let mine run while i was sleeping or at work and it eventually got done. you can also pull stuff down to play it when you have no service, TBH im not sure how well it works as ive never used the feature

 

[dainthomas]

You misunderstand. I'd rather buy the music again through amazon's mp3 app and download it directly to my phone than try to drag and drop stuff from my iTunes folder to my android phone. I know dragging and dropping music isn't exactly taxing, but if you've got a very large library of music and want to rotate it semi-randomly over time, there is nothing in android that can match a smart playlist in iTunes set to sync automatically whenever the device is in range. I wish like hell that iTunes would somehow magically support my android phone.

I just buy the biggest microsd card I can and dump all the music from my computer on there. Done. Why do I have to "rotate it" when I can just have all of it all the time?

 

[MrX8503]

Copy paste works but what about books, photos, contacts, album art, apps? Management and syncing across multiple devices? Home screen app organization sync?

Photos geo tag, faces, events sync?

Let me guess you have to use 10 different syncing software.

With iTunes I check/uncheck what I need and press sync.

 

[Anubis]

if you use amazon for books they sync with amazons app automatically, else its drag and drop or built in windows sync - google books also syncs across devices IIRC
photos would be drag and drop (computer), or you could use windows built in auto import which comes up every time you plug your phone in - also photos (from phone/tab) automatically sync with your google acnt as well so they are available everywhere
Contacts sync with your google acnt automatically
Album art is part of the mp3s id3 tag
aps sync to your google acnt – no idea what else you would be syncing them to.
same with events in in google calendar or Facebook
geotagging should be in the metadata which should stay with teh photo on any sync method used

so no software needed

 

[Atomic Playboy]

It mystifies me that anyone complains about iTunes being frustrating. It has worked far better for me in putting exactly what I want on the devices I have that support it than anything else I've tried. The only thing I've tried that even approaches it is Winamp, and I'm pretty sure you can use Winamp with iDevices too. But why would you want to use something that is just like iTunes but not as intuitive when you could use iTunes?

You've had a good experience with iTunes because you took the time to set it up. I've used iTunes a handful of times, either to sync files with friends' mp3 players a few years back, or more recently, to transfer music files onto my roommate's iPod. Well, that file transfer was a snap; one click, let 'er rip. But when I browse the music on that iPod, 90% of the albums have the tracks in random order as opposed to arranged sequentially. These are albums that I personally ripped from my collection of CDs, and they worked like a charm the first time on my Galaxy S3 with a simple copy/paste, but apparently iTunes has determined that it knows better than Pink Floyd what order people want to listen to "The Wall" in. That's frustrating, and I don't want to take the time to clear the entire contents, figure out why it did that, configure iTunes so it won't do that, and redo the process from scratch. No other music software I've ever used has randomly changed the order of files that have proper ID3 tags and file structure. What the hell iTunes?

If you like iTunes, more power to you. But judging from the responses on here, more people are of the frame of mind that I am; it's annoying, bloated software, and even if it can make things easier, it's not the best for sorting a music library, and the fact that you have literally no other option for getting music onto an iPhone/iPod is frustrating.

 

[jpeyton]

Samsung's Q2 results are humongous

 

[MrX8503]

That's fine if you can sync all that over various services, but I'd rather have a one stop shop.

 

[slayernine]

I hear the average size is 5"