![]()
I was hoping I'd like this app since I really hate iTunes. I hate it so much that I downgraded from iTunes 12 to iTunes 11.4 on Yosemite. Still hate it!
But after installing Swinsian I immediately ran into problems and then found other things I don't like.
It’s very quick at importing an iTunes library - took about 12 seconds to import 19,798 tracks.
But I noticed that all my podcasts were now in the music section, not listed under Podcasts where they should be. So I sent the developer a message and he replied:
"The xml version of the iTunes library doesn't associate the podcast subscription information with the individual episode tracks, which is why Swinsian only imports the episodes as tracks rather than podcast episodes. The podcasts section in Swinsian displays podcast subscriptions (and the associated episodes) rather than just a list of tracks. So it doesn’t have a way to show ‘orphaned’ podcast episodes where the subscription isn’t know. I guess maybe I could change that and add a section for isolated individual episodes that don’t have an associated subscription. I will check the iTunes xml file to see if anything has changed in the way it writes them in recent updates.”
Then I discovered that Swinsian doesn’t accept half-star ratings and any changes made in Swinsian do not transfer over to iTunes.
There’s also no equalizer! I need some control over the output - I may be listening on headphones or computer speakers, rock, country or podcast, and need to make adjustments. I own Hear, but haven’t installed it yet on my new computer, was hoping I wouldn’t need to.
And last but certainly not least is the fact that every time I close then open Swinsian, it's BLANK! The entire library is gone and must be re-imported.
So I emailed the dev. again and this is his response:
"You shouldn’t need to rescan the iTunes library every time. If it isn’t saving the library then that sounds like a bug. Changes you make to tags in Swinsian will not transfer over to iTunes. If you need to keep iTunes up to date as well then it may not be worth using Swinsian for your use case.”
The vanishing library does sound like a bug and I’ve deleted the pref file but it didn’t help. Surely a bug this obvious would have been reported by many users by now, yet I seem to be the only plagued by this critter.
I try to rate each song I listen to and often need to edit the info for tracks or albums, and I definitely want those ratings reflected in iTunes - I don’t want two apps with different metadata for the same library. If I’ll have to keep both open and keep switching to iTunes to rate tracks (including half-stars), AND there’s no EQ, I see no benefit for using this instead of iTunes.
Read more]]>
