And plus, by buying music instead of downloading it of youtube, you can be assured it's the highest quality. At least, most all songs from mp3va should be. Typically, unless the song's ancient, it should be at least 256k. The newer ones are even 320k. The previews are only worbled for security purposes. If you for whatever reason get a low quality song with your purchase they will help you sort that out if you contact them

Sebby I say unto yee, scripting? retagging? meh! apple can take Itunes and their Orwellian organization and shove it up their vertical device hole! If people happen to like it, fare enough, but Apple should try and give alternatives for those who don't instead of trying to monopolize everyone into their own little corporate  desire satisfaction box.  In fairness it's not just Apple that does this, it's a pretty common thing across the world, call something "choice" by providing just one alternative and setting the price for that alternative, brave new world here we come.
But less philosophically, I'm personally just happy with what I'm doing, especially with the Victor.

As to Mp3va, well charts don't interest me in the least, so hopefully they have more stuff than that.

@Jack, Mp3va seemed to have a weerd organization. I was looking to see if it had stuff I'd be interested in, but instead of giving a standard search list of results,it seemed to have several lists, which was confusing, then if I looked under genre such as film soundtracks it just gave a lot of sub genre boxes and the "best sold" which meant about 13, for example there was nothing by John Williams under  soundtracks which seems loopy to me.
Indeed, I was just trying to search for the soundtrack to the film Hook, which as I said was rereleased in 2013, but I couldn't even get a john williams discography.

Then again, this is one reason I don't like all this "artist" stuff, sinse in anorchestra who is the artist? the composer? the conductor?

Any suggestions? The site might be a good thing but I'd prefer to check it's got the sort of stuff I want before I go sinking money into it, and as I said, charts just don't interest me in the least.

As to itunes, I did try converting a cd into itunes, but then couldn't find where the tracks had gone, (I looked in my music but no go), that's why I don't trust buying from the thing.
M4a format would be okay in and of itself, but not if the stuff is locked into itunes forever more amen, which seemed to be the case.

I have heard itunes is better on Mac in terms of basic access to the program, but even if I do get a mac I don't see the point o changing my entire media collection and organization around, particularly sinse I've customized winamp for my quad speakers anyhow.
If there ever is a way to buy from itunes on my Iphone and then directly extract the files via usb to do with as I want I might try that, but I doubt that will happen.

@Figment, I found Itunes workable up until version 12 where they killed the side bar headings so there wasn't a way to know which bit of the tree I was on. Whether this has been solved with a supernova map file in a future version I don't know, but any program who's accessibility requires information which was! on screen and has been taken off in a so called version upgrade doesn't get much cop with me, particularly sinse generally speaking Supernova is very good at just reading and running with stuff by default without any scripting or whatever.

That was the last straw, after all this playlist library crap I had had enough and gave Itunes the heave ho.

With Mp3va I thought It'd work searching for starwars sinse that is a title, but I'm not interested in starwars music as I already have that, I wanted to know what they had by the composer john williams. I searched under John Williams first, and then under williams john, but got as I said some confusing lists of results in different genre categories or whatever, and lets not even go into what happened when I tried searching for "hook" or "hook film soundtrack" or "hook soundtrack"

Why the site has all this genre mallarchy instead of giving me a basic title search I don't know. Still, if it's setup for, and mainly does just pop music charts it's probably not going to be much help to me.

There's no doubt that iTunes isn't a first-class citizen on Windows, or vice-versa. It is definitely slower and less refined. Still, for the constraints of the Windows ecosystem including the way screen readers work, I think Apple have made it as clean and as well-integrated as possible. Most of the "Bloat" people find in iTunes is actually just libraries that Apple ported over from Mac OS to Windows so it could run iTunes on top of those substrates, which while it clearly suits Apple very well, doesn't make for happy hardcore Windows users. This is, in all important respects, no different from the situation Mac users face running MS Office; the Windows experience using Office is just plain better. No doubt also a very non-altruistic scheme to screw the blind.

Check under Help, Keyboard Shortcuts. There are quite a few of them. If you are on JAWS make sure you have the latest updates, and if you want even more speed there's JTunes. The FSCast on iTunes was also quite informative. I found Window-Eyes to be more responsive than any other screen reader using iTunes, which makes sense since Apple specifically suggests it, but I don't see why you should have any difficulty no matter your screen reader of choice; it simply takes a good bit of getting used to it. And I think you'll find that iTunes is very important in the education sector, so the chances of accessibility being compromised in the future are probably quite small. It'd be nice if they allowed access to their stores without the application though; I'm sure that would go a long way for many typical use cases.

You can tell if a music file is protected because the extension is "m4p". If it isn't, and it won't be for any music tracks you now buy, you have DRM-free. Your stream will play these files, and since converting between lossy formats is not a very good idea, I'd recommend you download and keep your originals. I'm glad there are accessible alternatives for purchasing though. The real catch is the iBook store; some of what they sell is, and some is not, protected, and you don't find out until you purchase it. Everything else is DRM, of course.

In tangentially related news: iTunes Match now allows the upload of 100,000 tracks (up from 25,000).

@Figment, I don't mind the categorisation, but it sort of annoyed me that you couldn't have a basic list of search results, ie, all the albums with the name john williams of whatever genre but had to look in different random genre categories. If there is a way to just display all results and miss out the genre thing that'd be much better.

As to Itunes, sinse the sidebar labels went bye bye in 2014, you probably had them at the start, indeed I suspect part of the reason you found Itunes got worse was the lack of such as much as anything with Jaws scripts.

I probably would've tried to live without them if I hadn't already been pretty annoyed with Itunes anyway what with all it's ridiculous functions and silly tree structure and lack of compatibility with any sensiblle layout.
As I've said before, I really don't like this modern tendency of chucking everything on screen at once at letting sighted users sort out what is where, as opposed to giving a more streamlined access to information with more standard lists and different parts of the display hidden etc, still more because another modern conceit is no ability to customize the interface at all! ever!

Figment, for your library files, see Edit > Preferences > Advanced. You'll find the path under iTunes media folder. You can change it. By default it lives in your Windows system music folder in your home folder.

As for ribbons, I can't stand them. I'm sure they must be very convenient visually, but from an accessibility perspective they're an absolute bloody nightmare. The critical issue is that because they are essentially bounded two-dimensional structures, there's no way to simply use one pair of arrow keys to navigate them. If you press the right-arrow to move, but have reached the end of the ribbon, you instead move vertically, with the focus positioned on the next vertical row which is at that horizontal position. Hence, one cannot simply go back as one could in a simple menu structure. Another win for the Mac.

Sebbby, Thanks for that on iTunes, it will get my iPhone backup files out of my music folder.

That may be true when using NVDA, but in JAWS, if you turn on the "Use Ribbons" option, the perception to the user is that they are navigating through classic pull down menus with wrap around at either end of the menu bar and at the top and bottoms of each pull down menu. +1 for JAWS and Windows.

Dark,

I agree, the classic pulldown menus are better, with the menus lined up horizontaly, left and right arrows, then the submenus verticle, up and down arrows. When the "Use Ribbins" is turned off, the ribbons are a pain, but when it is turned on, the ribbons are rearranged so that each ribbon is a menu just like in a menu bar, and the contents of each ribbon is the vertical pulldown menu. You can't make the ribbons go away, but with the "use Ribbins" option they may as well not be there.

If you are at all interested in mp3va, experiment with it a bit, their indexing and cateforizing sometimes leaves something to be desired, but if they have what you are looking for, you'll eventually find it.

I dropped Audio Grabber from my list of CD rippers to look at, I don't know how good it is, but Microsoft Smart screen filtering indicated that it was unsafe. So I deleted it.

@FigmentI'll check mp3va and see.

As to audio grabber, actually that's the one program you mentioned I have used, usually when windows media player got wrong information for a disc I wanted to rip or when it was a none standard disc, such as an audiobook a friend gave me.

Neither Avg nor Malware bites nor my computer had any problems at all, so I suspect this is a false positive for microsoft.

My only issue with audio grabber was that I couldn't work out how to download track info from the internet, or even if it had that function at all, hence why I continued with plane old wmp.

Apart from that thoughno problem, though of course audiograbber is a much more complex program with a lot of different functions that those more into sound design  would be interested in.

iTunes creates a folder in your music folder called iTunes, in it iTunes puts media files added to your library by ripping, purchase, or manually. Why they do that instead of just putting the file directly in your library, I don't know. the Microsoft Zune software did the same thing, but unlike iTunes, you could move the files to your main library and the software adapted by adding references to the files you moved to your library and removing the references to the file in the inbound folder. iTunes stubbornly held on to the original file references even though they were now invalid and didn't want to recognize the new files where you moved them.

The iTunes folder in your music folder also contains all the backup files for those devices you are using iTune to backup.

Since I will now be using iTunes strictly as a backup program, the only thing that will be in the iTunes folder will be my backup files, so it isn't appropriate for the iTunes folder to be in my music library.

The iTunes folder is your library. You're supposed to like the iTunes layout and accept that your library is managed by iTunes, and any changes that you will ever want to make will be from within iTunes. The option to change your media folder merely changes where files will end up. That's apparently Apple's feeling, anyway. Unlike WMP, iTunes relies on the concept of centralisation and doesn't like it when you change file locations. The only way to change this is to tell iTunes never to copy files into the media libraries, and instead manually point to the existing files you have; the library database then refers to whatever you point at. But of course this is of no help if the person managing the directory structure is not the same person managing the iTunes database, as happens on a central media server where everybody is contributing. Such is Apple's overbearing hubris. Naturally I don't endorse WMP either: it also relies on tags, and the best you can do to turn off the library is simply to ask it never to add to the library when you play a file; you still can't automatically tag media just by renaming it in the filesystem. iTunes always does this automatically when you update tags, whether the file is copied into the media library or not, and there is no way to turn it off. So, if you want to avoid adding to the library, use another media player. This difference in philosophy I think very nicely illustrates the Mac/Windows divide, insofar as Apple optimises for the case that you will appreciate what it provides you, whereas on Windows the overriding concern is the availability of interfaces. Both approaches have their advantages and their disadvantages.

I'm glad you've found your backup data. On Mac OS that data is stored separated from the media folder, in "~/Library/Application Support/MobileSync/Backup". If you have no other use for iTunes then I'd simply leave the directories alone because there won't be anything valuable in there, and unless you want to make a further backup, they're doing fine where they are. Just move your media folder outside the Music folder so it isn't polluting your other uses of that folder.