I sold my body for iTunes

I have finally found mp3 listening perfection, and it’s available from Apple. That’s right, iTunes. My girlfriend owns a Mac and I’d fiddled with iTunes in the past and always hated it. Not just your average everyday, “this sucks” hatred, but more along the lines of “WHY THE HELL WON’T YOU PLAY WHAT I WANT, NO DON’T MOVE THAT TO THE BOTTOM OF THE LIST, ARRRG!” throw shit around the room hatred. I thought it was clunky and poorly organised, and hated the way you couldn’t arrange the list of songs you were playing in the order you wanted without actually creating a new playlist. See, I’m a winamp kid.

I’d been using winamp pretty much since version 2 debuted back in 1998 and it was so familiar that it was hard to move away. I dabbled with sonique for a while, but gave it up because it was all style over substance, then had a shot with beoplayer and ditched it for the same reason. Looked great, but didn’t play music very well. Winamp 3 was just a joke, resource heavy and with an absurd set of features that just got in the way of listening to music. So when iTunes appeared for the PC earlier this year, I was skeptical at best.

The secret to iTunes is good tags. If your music library is tagged well, it will work like a charm, if it isn’t then good luck. I’ve been struggling with getting my shit in order for a while now and iTunes gave me the excuse I needed to finally spend the hours I needed to finally sort everything out. Once you’ve got that sorted it really is incredible. Creating playlists is easy as pie, but better than that, you can use smart playlists to do some really funky shit. “Select all songs from 2003 with a genre of Electroclash that I have never listened to”, no problems. You’ll find you’ve got music on your system that you never even knew existed.

I think my favourite thing is images for albums though. I really dig cd cover art and I think having it up when a particular album is playing really bridges the gap between physical and digital music. Why would you bother going to the store when you can have the CD ready to play legally from home in about 20 seconds.

So, once I complete my fanwhoredom and buy an iPod, I really think my conversion to a glassy-eyed Apple supporter will be complete.

Posted in Tech on Saturday December 27, 2003.