iTunes is A-OK
Three weeks ago my life changed forever. For the better. Yes, that's right:
iTunes was released for PC.
I spent three years working for a Mac reseller. In that time, I became an avid mac user. Hell, if I didn't play the occassional PC game, I'd really have no reason to ever use a Windows machine again.
Yeah, my family's first computer many, many years ago was an Apple with lots of floppy disk games, and I still have a Macintosh IIsi, but somewhere between my childhood and high school, I quit using Macs. In fact, Macs disgusted me for a while. Our high school had some awful, awful old Macs. The first thing that started to change my mind was the release of the iMac. My mom was working at the public library at the time and brought one home to work on. I was so amazed! It was a Macintosh! It was running at fast speeds! My opinion of Macs was on the rise, but it wasn't until I started working at a computer store that I really started to enjoy them.
Anyway, to get back on topic, Apple released their media player three or four years ago, I think. iTunes was quite the improvement over SoundJam, our previous media player of choice at work. iTunes quite frankly made SoundJam look like a sissy. For once, filling in the ID3 tags of your MP3s meant something. It organized all of our music, sorted it by genre (Even those silly fake genres Jeff used to make), sorted by album. It even had the best visualization thingy. Our old co-worker, Andy, spent many hours gazing at it. It did everything short of making love to you, a feature it is unfortunately still lacking.
The first thing on my mind was, "When is this coming out for PC?" At the time, I did not have a decent Mac computer. I kept all my music on the PC, and I was stuck using WinAmp. Eventually I aquired a more recent, but still old iMac (Indigo). This computer still didn't have the processing speed or hard drive space to support my music collection. Future versions of iTunes have come and gone. They've added the music store, and finally they created iTunes for PC.
Oh did I wait for the release date. I even tried to download and install the Mac version before the PC version came out. It did not work. Finally the day arrived (October 15 or 16th I believe) and I downloaded it the first chance I got.
To say that this program has occupied my time is an understatement. Almost my entire collection of MP3s lacks ID3 tags. I've spent countless hours putting in ID3 tags and organizing music. It has become an addiction. Granted, this is maybe a fourth of all the music I have. I intend to buy a ridiculously large hard drive just so I can run every song I have through iTunes.
For those of you PC users out there (if anyone reads this) who have not yet downloaded iTunes, let me just say a few things about how great it is.
The interface is quite grand. It looks pretty much exactly the same as the Mac version, though the taskbar at the top is ugly. Unless you really hate the brushed metal look Mac programs have been using, it looks quite nice. PC users might have a little trouble grasping the concept of a window that will not maximize to fit your entire screen. Deal with it. This program is too delicious to get your undies in a bunch because of window sizing.
As I've mentioned, the organizational qualities of the program are worth the purchase price (free) to begin with. If you are obsessive over organization and making lists like I am, you will love this program. Playlists are very easy to make, it has many equalization settings, you can rate songs, it keeps track of your most played songs, and the simplicity of burning and ripping CDs will make you weep. Oh yeah, apparently you can also buy music and download it from their music store. The only negative thing I can say about it is that it seems to be a memory hog. I am only using 256 MB of RAM, and my computer seems to think harder when iTunes is running.
Well, that was a ridiculously long post. If you read that all, I apologize. If you just skimmed to the bottom, all you need to know is that you need to download and use iTunes.
iTunes was released for PC.
I spent three years working for a Mac reseller. In that time, I became an avid mac user. Hell, if I didn't play the occassional PC game, I'd really have no reason to ever use a Windows machine again.
Yeah, my family's first computer many, many years ago was an Apple with lots of floppy disk games, and I still have a Macintosh IIsi, but somewhere between my childhood and high school, I quit using Macs. In fact, Macs disgusted me for a while. Our high school had some awful, awful old Macs. The first thing that started to change my mind was the release of the iMac. My mom was working at the public library at the time and brought one home to work on. I was so amazed! It was a Macintosh! It was running at fast speeds! My opinion of Macs was on the rise, but it wasn't until I started working at a computer store that I really started to enjoy them.
Anyway, to get back on topic, Apple released their media player three or four years ago, I think. iTunes was quite the improvement over SoundJam, our previous media player of choice at work. iTunes quite frankly made SoundJam look like a sissy. For once, filling in the ID3 tags of your MP3s meant something. It organized all of our music, sorted it by genre (Even those silly fake genres Jeff used to make), sorted by album. It even had the best visualization thingy. Our old co-worker, Andy, spent many hours gazing at it. It did everything short of making love to you, a feature it is unfortunately still lacking.
The first thing on my mind was, "When is this coming out for PC?" At the time, I did not have a decent Mac computer. I kept all my music on the PC, and I was stuck using WinAmp. Eventually I aquired a more recent, but still old iMac (Indigo). This computer still didn't have the processing speed or hard drive space to support my music collection. Future versions of iTunes have come and gone. They've added the music store, and finally they created iTunes for PC.
Oh did I wait for the release date. I even tried to download and install the Mac version before the PC version came out. It did not work. Finally the day arrived (October 15 or 16th I believe) and I downloaded it the first chance I got.
To say that this program has occupied my time is an understatement. Almost my entire collection of MP3s lacks ID3 tags. I've spent countless hours putting in ID3 tags and organizing music. It has become an addiction. Granted, this is maybe a fourth of all the music I have. I intend to buy a ridiculously large hard drive just so I can run every song I have through iTunes.
For those of you PC users out there (if anyone reads this) who have not yet downloaded iTunes, let me just say a few things about how great it is.
The interface is quite grand. It looks pretty much exactly the same as the Mac version, though the taskbar at the top is ugly. Unless you really hate the brushed metal look Mac programs have been using, it looks quite nice. PC users might have a little trouble grasping the concept of a window that will not maximize to fit your entire screen. Deal with it. This program is too delicious to get your undies in a bunch because of window sizing.
As I've mentioned, the organizational qualities of the program are worth the purchase price (free) to begin with. If you are obsessive over organization and making lists like I am, you will love this program. Playlists are very easy to make, it has many equalization settings, you can rate songs, it keeps track of your most played songs, and the simplicity of burning and ripping CDs will make you weep. Oh yeah, apparently you can also buy music and download it from their music store. The only negative thing I can say about it is that it seems to be a memory hog. I am only using 256 MB of RAM, and my computer seems to think harder when iTunes is running.
Well, that was a ridiculously long post. If you read that all, I apologize. If you just skimmed to the bottom, all you need to know is that you need to download and use iTunes.