In article <sij6v5d1qm5qlaqpsh3ct1d1favfi58m9o@4ax.com>, Paul Miner
<pminer@elrancho.invalid> wrote:

> I find playlists to be clumsy and inflexible. For me, it's much more
> intuitive to just play what I want, when I want, without worrying
> whether I have a playlist or not.

you can do that too.

> >> Copy the files to a card. Plug the card in any device you like. Play
> >> what's on it when you like. Why is that so hard for a fanboi to
> >> understand?
> >
> >why is it so hard to understand that without a database, you can't
> >search for music very effectively. plus, how do you keep track of
> >what's on which card? sounds like a royal pain in the ***.
>
> Why would I need a database? That sounds like overkill for a simple
> task like listening to music. In fact, it sounds like a royal pain in
> the ***.

it's not anything you see. the database makes it very easy to search by
song title, artist, album, genre or composer (and on a computer, just
about any attribute of a song).

it's a lot more flexible than file/folder. the largest capacity ipod
can hold 40,000 songs. do you really want to manually manage that as
files and folders?? ugh.

it also makes it easy to track play counts, skip counts and song
ratings, so that a smart playlist can automatically update.

one example is have a playlist of songs that haven't been played for
six months and copy 50 random songs from it to the ipod each time it's
synced. that way you'll always have something new to listen to, in
addition to your normal selection of music. rate a song with a 1 star
when you're listening to it and it will disappear on the next sync.

very easy and significantly more flexible.

> >removing a card means the database is now invalid and it would also
> >need to update the database with any card insertion.
>
> Insert a card and play music. What is this database of which you speak
> and why do you feel it's important?

see above.