Can anyone make me like iTunes?!

[peanutismint]

I hate iTunes. It's a great player with some awesome features, but a few terrible choices in programming which cripple it, imho. The biggest factor for me is that iTunes expects you to get music into it in a certain way, either through the iTunes shop or through ripping from CD. Well I obtain a lot of music from other sources, so every time I get a new record or whatever, I have to manually add it to the iTunes library, and I'm so bad at remembering what's new, what I've already added and what I haven't, I choose not to use it, rather preferring to organise my music externally via folders and what have you, and listen in something more WinAmp like, such as VLC.

I'd love to start using iTunes, but I'm just wondering if there's any way to have it 'watch' my music folders for new tracks and add them to the library automatically. If I have to do it manually, I'll end up spending half my life trying to keep my library synced with my music folders.....

Any ideas?


(the same goes for iPhoto.... any ideas?!)

 

[peanutismint]

I bit the bullet about 6 months ago and got it to organise my music in one folder and copy to that folder whenever I add new tunes and it's so much easier.

I always used it just for general playback and playlists but I've since got the hang of Smart Playlists, Video Playlists, "Skip When Shuffling" etc and I wouldn't use anything else now.

So if you let it organise your music, does it automatically update when you add new folders/tracks to your library? And can you stipulate how you'd like it to arrange your folders etc? Like by Artist, Album etc?

Also, what are smart playlists and 'skip when shuffling'? I'm VERY anal when it comes to file/folder management, so I think it'd take a very good system to make me adjust to it, rather than it adjusting to me....