iTunes of the Times
Over the past many years my music collection has fallen prey to digital disillusion. I’ve ripped my entire CD collection (twice), grabbed album covers off of Amazon, and bought enough hard drive space to store weeks and weeks of music. Problem is, day-to-day, I listen to the same limited collection. Under Linux, I never had a good enough music manager to help me actively build playlists based on ratings, genres, or whatever strange combination of music desire hit me.
Enter iTunes (for free, no less).
Dead simple — yet powerful — interface, dynamic playlists, nice cross-fade effects, etc. I took the time to sync most of my collection down to my laptop and spent much of the 8 hour drive to LA updating cover art and making initial passes at personal ratings. Now, I can listen to a random selection of my 9+ days of “Not Crap” music anywhere I want. It’s nice to re-discover some old favorites.
I’ll definitely be buying more music now, and probably too much of it from the iTunes music store; but it pisses me off that the AAC recordings won’t play on my Audiotron (stereo MP3 component). I expect that Apple will probably come out with a home media iTunes gadget pretty soon. Something which takes ethernet (more likely WiFi) in, spits out either line-level RCA or digital optical audio, has a great remote, and probably an on-TV interface. If the interface was good enough, and worked well with iTunes, I’d buy that.
