Update: iTunes
I first posted about iTunes back in December. Since then, I have started using my iPod Shuffle almost daily. My last post was a bit generic, and since that time, I have discovered many new things. For one, I have completely devoted myself to the iTunes music library for managing all of my music files. I spent time to edit the tags for many of the files to help the search feature work more properly. The awesome Album View in the program is something I didn’t know existed before. With a single click you can turn your library into an album cover 3-D flipbook. I really love this feature, but I don’t use it by default.
Another effortless goodie is finding that iTunes was keeping count of how often I played certain songs, which is even true for the iPod. When I plug my iPod into my computer, it syncs with iTunes and it knows what songs I prefer and those I don’t. The AutoFill option for the iPod is something I hadn’t had any desire to try in the past. I finally clicked on it and I was stunned. It automatically filled my entire iPod with a random selection of songs from my library. It offered to erase my iPod first, have it lean more toward higher rated songs, and more.
I do have two things on my wishlist for future versions of iTunes. I want the music library to watch certain folders automatically, much the way that Google Picasa does for my pictures. When I add more songs to a folder, I want the library to automatically include it without me telling it to. This may already be the case when working with the iTunes file folder that it established, but I keep most of my mp3s in an outside folder. Still, it knows this. My second item to mention is minor, but it is a bug I think I have found. When I am renaming an album title or some other information tag in music files, and I have songs that have different capitalizations of the same phrase, iTunes tries to match my type to an already incorrect listing. Hitting [Backspace] and [Delete] have no effect. I have to type it elsewhere and cut and paste it into the field to correct the upper and lowercase differences.
Every day that I use iTunes, I have grown to love it more and more. I am always discovering something new about it, and also discovering what it was already doing for me without me knowing. In fact, it works so intuitively and easily that I have come to wish my whole computer could work in such a crisp, polished manner. Perhaps I should buy a Mac?
