If I said to you that I wanted an alternative to Music (née iTunes) that would retain all the playlists and star ratings that I’ve spent the last 15 years building up, but be at least twice the speed and three times more intuitive to use, what would you say? It definitely needs to be totally compatible with the old iTunes so I don’t lose any of my stuff, and it definitely needs to be able to handle large libraries (mine is 2.33TB).
Does such a thing exist?
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Right — I’m trying something called Swinsian. I may be some time…
Looks interesting but last ‘blog’ entry in 2018….
I’m going to need something like this at some stage Leicester..,is it Mac only though?
Roon?
What he said.
Give the free trail a go – it will just search for your music and will not making any changes to meta data etc so you have nothing to lose if it doesn’t meet the requirements. I believe that it can import iTunes playlists…..
https://kb.roonlabs.com/Importing_playlists
Thank! Yes, I did look at Roon last night. To be honest, I think it probably offers more than I’m looking for. i.e. “Instead of seeing a spreadsheet-like view of your music (as with iTunes and almost all other media systems), Roon provides a very rich non-list based experience, using credits, artist relationships, genres, lyrics, concert/tour dates, artwork, and more to allow for an informative navigation and exploration of your library.”
Actually, I just want the old iTunes ‘spreadsheet’ back. You used to be able to search the old iTunes. The ‘Music’ search function is toilet. it didn’t used to take five minutes to fire up, and then an extra two minutes of spinning beach ball while it decided whether or not to play the song you’ve selected. It used to link quickly to your phone or iPod rather than taking another five minutes to open a separate window. Changing tags was easy, not a ballache. etc. etc.
However, I’m having some good luck with Swinsian. There are issues, and I’ve currently got a query in with support, but the main one — speed — is solved. Plus it’s very easy to navigate and re-tagging is sooo simple. For looks, it uses the old iTunes template, which means the good old browser is back. Also, I still have all my old play counts, ratings and playlists.
Bad points. The playlists are no longer smart. You can of course create your own new smart playlists, but the old iTunes ones have converted to normal bog-standard jobbies in the transition. That’s a blow. Also, you can’t rip CDs with it. It might be that I have to rip CDs on iTunes then manually drag the files into Swinsian. Same with updating phone and iPod.
Yes, Roon does import iTunes playlists. I’ve done it during my 14 day trial Very quick to add music from iTunes and other sources and keeps a watch on the folders to add any new stuff. There are several different ways of organising music in Roon – playlists, favourites, tags, bookmarks etc plus Roon Radio (similar to Spotify Artist radio but better). This is all great but not necessarily if you want a simpler experience.
I don’t know the answer but as far as speed is concerned, the number of tracks (or maybe folders) is likely to be more important than the storage space used. I think iTunes treats a 1M track the same as it would a 100M track.
If you find an answer to your question, I’d love to know.
Fortunately I decided not to update to ‘Music’ so still on last iTunes version and for the time being all is good
I agree that Roon doesn’t do the same thing – I use it but I’m not that good with it and it is a pain with working out multiple disk sets and editing them.
I tried JRiver and that does offere more features akin to Roon but still really just want a fast iTunes
I’m happy to say that Swinsian has provided me with my answer. Yes, there are drawbacks — see above — but the benefits are better than the drawbacks are a drag, so I’m considering it a home win.
The best thing is no more spinning ball! Ever! Fiddling with tags is a breeze and its artwork-finding is great, so most of the stuff lost in the great Catalina conversion has come back, while the process of adding artwork manually is much less of a ballache than it was before. It’s not as good-looking, and there’s no dark mode, but I couldn’t care less.
Timtunes, I’d say give it a go.
I’m looking now….