You’ll have to excuse me if I continue rambling like a poor fanboy - but Apple’s iTunes is still about the neatest thing I think I’ve ever seen in my entire life. I think their cover blurb on their web site is not all that far from the truth:
Now that I’ve begun to explore the ‘net radio options, and some of the more interesting and deeper features of iTunes, I’m becoming increasingly convinced that Apple was beyond smart to port this application to Windows. I honestly think it’s one of the best apps I’ve ever used, from a UI standpoint as well as an overall functionality standpoint. I honestly don’t see myself running my computer without iTunes running - unless I’m playing a game. There’s no reason not to. I love music - most of you know this, and I’m in the process right now in my office of importing every single CD I own into iTunes so I don’t have to worry about bringing any of them into work ever again.
As it stands right now, my personal library has 1145 songs, worth 4.06 GB of disk space, with a total length of 3 days worth of listening. THREE DAYS. That’s entirely too cool. So what I’m doing right now is basically just hopping from radio station to radio station (which I hope more stations sign on for this, it’s the greatest), while I stick CDs in my computer time and time again.
I do have a few problems with it, however.
First of all, you’re limited to the (often faulty) listings for albums found on GraceNote CDDB. While I’m personally not a big fan of GraceNote anymore (I used to be), and highly prefer FreeDB at this point, I think I can live with this. However, there still doesn’t appear to be any kind of quality control with CDDB - I’ve had more than one album turn up with horrendous listings that aren’t even close to what they should be. Most people would complain about genre issues with CDDB, but I think that their artist/album listings need some serious cleanup - there are more than a few albums that I need to work on. More reliable album listings would be highly appreciated.
Secondly, iTunes truncates physical filenames at an odd place - it doesn’t spit out very long folder or filenames for ripped files. I find this a little confusing, especially when I’m used to not having to worry about it. Is this a Mac-carryover feature? I’m curious. I didn’t think Macs had that small a filename limit, character-wise.
Third, the thing makes me want to buy an iPod. In a bad, bad way. I thought I had kicked the habit of wanting to buy one, but the sheer coolness of iTunes has made be re-reconsider that thought. I now want an iPod with a burning desire of geekdom that is possibly entirely too powerful for me to deal with.