Useful metadata which your MP3 software will ignore.

[lionsphil]

disctag is something trivial I just threw together (literally-it's past-midnight Perl, so if you care about it getting confused and chewing up your tags make backups first) as a post-step for abcde, a frontend for CDDB/cdparanoia/lame (et. al.) which-despite being a huge hairball of sh-remains one of the few ways to turn a CD into a bunch of MP3s

Comments

So iTunes really is the only usable soft MP3 player

[tomo2k]

I almost said 'decent', except that it installs Bonjour and will not run if you kill it.
Bonjour is the spawn of satan on a well-behaved network - I've had to manually blackhole it in the software firewall and just hope that it stays dead.

Not to mention continually pushing ****ing Safari on everyone. I do not need another web browser throwing at me - if I want another, I'll go and get it myself.

As to the plastic engineering - it's pretty much deliberate. Those cases are designed to be dirt cheap, unit cost inc shipping is well under 10p, probably under 5p.
So they use the cheapest plastic possible - usually polystyrene with no plasticisers (cheaper than expended PS!) - making it stupendously brittle.

Re: So iTunes really is the only usable soft MP3 player

[lionsphil]

Actually there's a whole laundry-list of reasons why iTunes is pretty much insufferable as well, and the day I install Apple software on a Microsoft OS again (or vica-versa) is the day I've apparently had a lobotomy.

I know the materials have to be cheap but I swear the actual mechanical design of some of these cases is terrible and does not allow for this.