One of the things that sort of bothered me about getting an iPod is that I knew I would have to use iTunes to manage my files. Although I had to use proprietary apps to get songs onto a media player in the past, they tended to merely be conduits and let me do pretty much whatever I wanted. I'd heard lots of horror stories about iTunes over the years, but lots of friends with iPods told me that the latest iterations of the app are pretty decent. So I bought the iPod, with some mild trepidation about signing my life away to an Apple application.
Having said all that, iTunes is a decent piece of software, but it can be pretty infuriating at the same time.
When I first started it up, it asked me where my music files were kept so that it could import them into the iTunes library. That was cool, since I was going to have to do that anyway.
What's not so cool was that as soon as I plugged the iPod into the USB port, iTunes immediately tried to copy my entire music library onto the iPod. On the surface, that's probably not all that bad, but automatically trying to copy about 15 gigs of music over to the iPod without once asking if I really wanted to do that is probably bad form.
There are some things about iTunes that I find a little aggravating.
The first is that it grabs the very first cover art image that Apple offers up (based on the CDDB listing for an album). I wish there was a way to be able to search for the correct image (as it turns out, I found a better way - see part 4).
Second, iTunes seems to be limited in the length of a filename, resulting in filenames (which are made up of track number, artist, and song title) being chopped off. It doesn't affect the MP3 track info within iTunes, but it's annoying.
Third, the idea that a compilation album is somehow different from regular albums. If an album is tagged as being a compilation, it gets put into the "Compilations" sub-folder. Again, this doesn't really affect anything, but why??
Of course, there's lot about iTunes that I really like.
I really like how iTunes will automatically ask to import and convert a CD as soon as you put one into the CD drive. What's even nicer is that it asks first if that's what you really want to do. It's too bad this behaviour isn't a little more consistent throughout the interface.
I'm completely impressed at the speed at which iTunes will rip a CD. In the past, I've always used a program called CDEX, which I've always found to be excellent, although a little on the slow side. It wouldn't be unusual for a CD to take about 20 minutes to rip. iTunes, however, can rip a CD in 4-6 minutes.
I love the whole podcast system. I love being able to subscribe to a podcast and have iTunes automatically check for, download, and sync new programs. I also like how it detects that you haven't listened to a particular podcast in a while and stops downloading new episodes until you start listening again.
Finally, there's also lots of stuff that I haven't really messed with yet, such as playlists. On-the-go playlists are interesting, although I find using the iPod itself to generate the playlist is a little time-consuming. I typically just find a genre or band that interests me and turn on shuffling.
All in all, iTunes is an interesting app and I hope it only improves going forward.
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