Congratulations, you're one of the %0.1 of people that wants to manually copy files from your manually-organized arbitrary directory structure onto your music player's filesystem. To support that, the player has to index all the files itself when it boots up, which is why the old Nomad took minutes to be ready to hit play.
Everyone else uses a database-backed program that automatically organizes their collection (iTunes), and expects to synchronize from that database to their device. If you weren't so set on doing things the way you did them in 1998, you'd be fine with iTunes — it can automatically download the podcast files, and synchronize that playlist when you plug in the device to charge it.
I'd wager more than %0.1 of the people would like to be able to get stuff from the player to the computer rather than only the other way around, for example, and more than %0.1 just find iTunes a pretty lame and hard to use product, regardless of file/DB model.
BTW, maybe I'm missing something here but shouldn't it be possible to keep an index on the device and just update it when files are added/deleted?
You can blame the record companies for that particular problem. It's not like Apple hasn't been dragging them kicking and screaming into the 21st century for years now. Letting you copy stuff from an iPod to a computer would just "encourage piracy."
iTunes is fairly jacked if you want to use it in any way besides "syncing your iphone". Try using it to point to your remote library on a shared file system. Immediately it tries to copy that whole file system into your local computer ..
A number of programs do this. In iTunes on OSX open up preferences, go to the advanced tab and half way down is the option "[x] Copy files to iTunes Media folder when adding to library"
Yeah, it's enabled by default but I'm pretty sure it's the correct behavior for most people.
0.1% of what population? Anyone who uses P2P music sharing is going to store their music in a manually-organized directory structure by necessity, and as a result, will have few problems dragging and dropping the root music directory into another one.
I don't even want to think how long it would take to tag 4,000 albums properly either. This fear alone keeps me away from database-backed music systems.
It will take the data from your MP3 Directory structure - lets say something like Artist/Album/song -- and automatically generate the correct tags for you.
Why does a manual directory structure require indexing? Directories ARE indexes. All the player needs to do is give you a file browser, which starts at the root of your music tree. My old Archos did that, and it was quickly ready to play after power-up.
No idea why you got downmodded there. Rockbox enables you to organize your music this way on lots of different devices now. You aren't required to rebuild the database, though if that's what you prefer you can push a couple of buttons and do that too.
Directories are, in a sense, high-maintenance indexes, but some of us find the existing tag system utterly inadequate and need to fall back to this solution.
No, I used tags. I just didn't use them on the player.
Given an outside-generated MP3 (as opposed to one I ripped from CD), I had scripts that would look at the tags to figure out where to put the file in my directory hierarchy.
Said directory hierarchy would then be synced to the Archos, where it would be accessed via the file browser.
To this day, I still miss this approach when I want to listen to classical music. I felt like listening to Beethoven's 5th symphony a couple days ago at work, and it took me about 5 minutes to find it on my iPhone. It would have taken me 5 seconds on my old Archos. The iPhone/iPod pretty much falls apart when faced with music that doesn't fit into the genre/artist/album classification.
It was broken when IPhone first came out, broken again with updates, required modifying your device, and will be broken again in future. So yes, GTKpod works, but not well.
Everyone else uses a database-backed program that automatically organizes their collection (iTunes), and expects to synchronize from that database to their device. If you weren't so set on doing things the way you did them in 1998, you'd be fine with iTunes — it can automatically download the podcast files, and synchronize that playlist when you plug in the device to charge it.