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Background

Many people are under the impression that iTunes is magical or something. iTunes contains their music and it only exists within iTunes. It's because if you obtain music legally, you never really see anything outside of iTunes. The music was on a CD, and then it's in iTunes, or the music was in the music store, and now it's in iTunes. It's a great design from a novice user's point of view, they have little to learn, but sometimes learning is good.

iTunes

iTunes has a default preference for its music location, ~/Music/iTunes/iTunes Music. Why it's this folder, I'm really not sure. It seems like it would make a lot more sense for it to just be your ~/Music folder, but I don't work at Apple, and Apple provides no real reason why it is this folder (maybe it's to avoid clutter in your ~/Music folder, maybe not).

Why have an iTumes Music folder as it's called in Apple's preferences at all? Because music should be stored in one central location. Thus, there's a bunch more (advanced) preferences that actually come with the iTunes Music folder. You can keep your music folder organized, you can have all of your music copied to your iTunes Music folder when it's added to iTunes, and you can even have your iTunes Music folder located somewhere else.

Having that music folder is somewhat misleading. If I add music to the music folder on my own, shouldn't iTunes pick up on that? Answer: it doesn't. Why? Because it would slow iTunes down (Amarok for *nix can do it just fine, but that's besides the point). Other than that, the preferences aren't really misleading. Well, that is until you realize that by default iTunes copies music to your iTunes Music folder for you. Why anyone decided that it was a good idea to have this preference enabled by default is beyond me. It's not entirely beyond me, I do understand it on the level of "we assume someone using our application has no prior knowledge of how to use a computer," but for people who do know what they're doing, it just doesn't make any sense as a default. If you download a song from the internet and add it to iTunes, then decide you don't want it any more, you have to delete it in two places, off your desktop, and within the iTunes Music folder. Of course, you could just delete it from your iTunes music library which will conveniently ask you if you want to delete it from your computer, but wait, you just did delete it! What to do? (Correct answer: delete it again).

Ugh.

Senuti

I believe that people copying music to their computers should have the option of using whatever music player they want. I will not set up Senuti to have the default copy location as ~/Music/iTunes/iTunes Music. It doesn't make sense. Senuti is not directly related to iTunes. It's a tool to use in conjunction with iTunes for probably close to 100% of the people who use it. I will be working on making it easer to use and smarter about choosing where to copy things and how to add songs to iTunes. For now the defaults settings are to copy to your ~/Music folder and not to add songs to iTunes. Those are the only logical defaults at this point.

The Point

When you use Senuti you have a few options. You can enable the preference to add songs to iTunes when they copy. At this point, though, as of version 0.33, Senuti does miss a few songs when adding songs to iTunes (another reason why adding songs to iTunes is disabled by default). In addition if you have Senuti add songs to iTunes and you are using iTunes default settings (or have the preference that copies songs to your iTunes Music folder enabled), Senuti will copy your music to your computer and the when it adds the music to iTunes, iTunes will make a copy of it. To avoid this, you can disable the preference in iTunes to copy songs to that folder, or you can change the preference in Senuti so that your save location is the same as your iTunes Music Folder location (which has a default value of ~/Music/iTunes/iTunes Music).

If you already copied the music to your computer and didn't enable the preference, you can simply drag and drop the files into iTunes. Again, though, if the preference to copy songs to your iTunes Music folder is enabled in iTunes, iTunes will duplicate all of your songs. You can either disable the preference and proceed with the drag and drop into iTunes, or you can move all of the files that Senuti copied into your iTunes Music folder before dragging and dropping into iTunes, and then since the music is already in the iTunes Music folder, iTunes won't copy them as they're added to iTunes even if the preference is enabled.

Last Remarks

I'm sorry that this is difficult. I don't like the way iTunes works. I want to make it easier and will be trying to in the future. For now my bias against the default setup of iTunes is prevailing.

Tags: iTunes, Senuti