How Poor Apple Interface Drove Me from Audible

I am very particular about usability and user interfaces. I’ve never been an Apple fan, because I dislike closed, vertically integrated systems that lock me into a single vendor at a premium — you have to buy their hardware to use their software, and it’s proprietary from end to end. But of course, there’s their much-vaunted interface design and sometimes I think maybe it would be worth it to switch to Apple products in order to get that famous design “je ne sais quoi” from Apple.

The problem is, I have hated the interface design of every Apple product I’ve ever used. Among the most collossal mistakes — on the original Macs, you eject your floppy drive by dragging it to the Trash.

Switching from Audible to eMusic because of iTunes Player Interface Sins

Until recently, I was locked into using iTunes at least some of the time because it’s the only authorized way to burn books from Audible to CD (the unauthorized way is to play the book start to finish using a sound capture card and essentially re-record it as an MP3). Unfortunately, every time I have to use the iTunes player, I feel like screaming. It’s the main reason I just cancelled my Audible subscription. And frankly, the need to use the iTunes player in order to buy tunes off iTunes is the main reason I refuse to patronize iTunes. I just did a free trial of eMusic, and I’m sold. It frees me from the evil that is Apple (yes, I know, MS and Google are the evil empires oppressing poor little Apple. Thank God. I think Apple is the most rapacious of the three, they just haven’t been as successful at world domination yet, but I think we would all come to regret it if Apple had the power of a MS or Google. No friends, they would not use it repsonsibly, but that’s a long topic).

So where does the iTunes interface fail?

1. Managing Audio Books is Next to Impossible.

I have two choices. Let iTunes manage my files, or manage them myself. Since I have a lot of audiobooks, I can’t let iTunes or any other player pull data from the internet manage your tracks. For example, for Harry Potter, which runs to almost 100 discs, it files them under 5 authors. For a single book, it will be the tracks under multiple titles. And it will split tracks from the same disc.

In my opinion, the author should always be condsidered the “artist” for an audiobook, not the reader or some other random person. If I let iTunes handle this, I’ll get Harry Potter books filed, stupidly, under the artists:

1. J. K. Rowling (space)
2. J.K. Rowling (no space)
3. Jim Dale (the reader)
4. Nicholas Hooper (who wrote one of the soundtracks for the movie… uhh this is an audiobook, not a movie)
5. Patrick Doyle (ditto)

Then for album titles, I’ll get

1. Harry Potter and the Sorceror’s Stone disc 1
2. Harry Potter and the Sorceror’s Stone disc 01
3. Harry Potter & the Sorceror’s Stone disc 1
4. Harry Potter The Sorceror’s Stone disc 1
5. Harry Potter and the Sorceror’s Stone [motion picture soundtrack]

Now, I’m not just anal. This means that in order to put together a playlist for a single book that actually plays the tracks from the book in order (which is kind of important for most books), you would have to hunt through, in the worst case for the scenario I gave above, 25 folders. Okay, I have not encountered the worst case, but I have had a single books split willy-nilly among as many as five folders. So there’s no way you can let iTunes manage your files and still be able to listen to a book in sequence without considerable effort.

Fine, I’ll manage them myself. But the tools for managing files are incredibily rudimentary.

If I burn tracks from a CD using iTunes, I have hardly any control over what goes where. I can select a main folder for my iTunes media and I can tell iTunes to manage the media or not. That’s it! In Winamp or Windows Media Player, I can say where I want imported files to go. They still mess up if I let them pull information from the internet, but at least I can burn to a “quarantined” area where I can look at the files from burn and make sure it didn’t spread them all over my media collection. With iTunes, I can’t do that.

Doesn’t Monitor my Media Folders

Seriously, I have to buy a $25 app just so that when I add files to my media folder, iTunes will see it by default? Otherwise, I have to “import” every time I add files. As I said, I don’t want to manage everything through iTunes. Of course, this wouldn’t be so bad, if not for the misguided playlist metaphor that dominates the interface.

Playlist Metaphor

And then, in iTunes, everything is done in a playlist metaphor. Yes, I can “Create playlist from selection”, but that means I have to find the files within iTunes, select them all (and for a book this could be 250 tracks if it’s 10 CDs with 25 tracks per CD), create a playlist and then play it. With Winamp, for example, I can just play a folder and I can also ask it to recurse down the directory tree and play everything in subfolders. In order. It takes me 7 seconds.

And then, and here’s what set me off this morning, if I want to burn a CD, I have to first create a playlist. Now, I only wanted to burn one track to a CD and normally I would never use iTunes to burn with, but this is an Audible book and Audible only works with iTunes (even the Audible Player won’t burn the book to disc). Now, let’s say I have a track downloaded to my desktop and I want to burn a CD in Windows Media Player. I simply open WMP, drag the file into the playlist area, and hit “Burn”. There’s no playlist saved, created or other annoyance.

I’m sure this is all well and good if my overriding objective is to use an iPod, but it isn’t.

Better Alternative – eMusic plus Winamp

So I have come up with better alternatives to managing media and getting my ID3 tags in my MP3s. That’s for a future post. But how can you get rid of dependence in the iTunes player? Well, there are only two services that really require me to use it: Audible and iTunes itself. So the key is to dump those services. These days, alternatives abound. For buying music and downloading audiobooks, you can go to Amazon or Wal-Mart or whereever.

If you want a subscription like Audible, though, I’ve switched to eMusic. Okay, full disclosure: I signed up for the eMusic free trial offer that came with my wife’s new laptop (but actually, if you just go to the site you get a similar offer without buying any laptop). The selection is somewhat limited in the free trial, but I still managed to find plenty of music and a book that I wanted. Even with a full subscription, you don’t have a catalog as extensive as Audible or iTunes, but it’s not bad and it’s cheaper than Audible ($10/month versus $15/month). For music, it’s subscription-based, so if you download more than ten tracks per month at iTunes, eMusic will be cheaper.

Most of all, though, the main thing that got me to switch is that eMusic files come as MP3s, so I can use any player I want to play, burn and otherwise enjoy my audio with any player I want, including easily putting it on a CD or my non-Apple MP3 player so I can enjoy my audiobooks in the car.

Good bye Audible. Good bye Apple. In the case of Audible, I’m sorry, because I like Audible and if they would let me manage my books easier, I would stick with them. In the case of iTunes… good riddance!

Now that I have that pointless rant out of my system (I’m understand that nobody really cares but me and that bashing Apple is an unfogiveable sin), as soon as I get a chance, I’m going to show you how I now just use filenames and create MP3 tags from filenames to manage everything, then I can control the sort order in any player… coming soon.