09.10.08
You Win Some, You Lose Some
Tuesday saw the Apple event, and with it came the news of iTunes 8 and a few other little bits. Before I go into this, I should probably say that I didn’t have any trouble with my iPhone backups before installing iTunes 8, and now they sort of stall or at the very least run intolerably slowly compared to before. That’s probably an artifact of the 2.0.2 firmware, though, so unless it persists after Friday (when 2.1 hits) I’m willing to let it slide and just not sync tomorrow.
What is interesting to note is that the biggest complaint I had with iTunes itself– the sometimes ten-second-long visits of the Beachball of Damnation– are now, largely, things of the past. Granted, my library is not terribly big compared to some folks’ stashes– I’m really only using about 82 GB (just under 20K files, and I did buy a 300 GB drive last year to ensure I didn’t run out of space), according to iTunes– but it was still a genuine pain in the ass to sync up, and I dreaded adding new material simply because it would be such a tremendous sink of time. Those days, thankfully, are gone, and I again have a reason to advocate the use of iTunes, as it’s back to what made it attractive for me in the first place: for the day-to-day stuff, it doesn’t get in the way. Smart Playlists are zippier, the Spotlight-search runs ludicrously fast again, and background tasks are now truly background, as opposed to “I’ll say it’s background, but good f$%#ing luck trying to do anything in the meantime”. I have some complaints about how some preferences were obscured (the genre panel option in particular; I don’t use it and I don’t want to waste time with it), but overall this is the kind of update that makes me really happy as an iTunes user.
Now, iTunes is grinding through my library to find out what songs I like through the Genius feature, which I am only using to see how it can reconcile my loves of both Maximum the Hormone and Debbie Gibson. My collection is the ruiner of AIs.
Probably we’ll talk more about this on Saturdayish.
Josh Miller said,
09.10.08 at 8:21 pm
My biggest problem is the insurmountable task to getting my music organized into SOME library.
I’d want to do it all right with album art and all which is a huge huge time sink that I can’t afford.
Roger said,
09.19.08 at 11:02 am
Check out “tag and rename” if you’re on windows. It lets you do smart file renaming, download album artwork, even auto-populate ID3 tags. It makes that kind of organization pretty easy, actually