I can see me doing this now, ripping a track off a CD of mine for the very first time. I was in my living room, it was
Orinoco Flow by Enya, and I was ripping it onto my PowerBook G3. Can't quite tell you when it was, can't even be sure that iTunes existed then, but I remember how peculiarly, deliciously weird it felt having that music continue playing after I took the CD out.
The most likely time was the late 1990s, which would put it before iTunes's release in 2001, but I think it's telling that I have not one single clue what in the world I used to rip that track, or to play it back with. I just remember feeling forced to catch up with all this ripping lark because my PowerBook G3 had stopped playing CDs. It would load them, I could rip this one, but it wouldn't play, and at the time I really needed the book of CDs I'd carry around with me.
I think it was my PowerBook nudging me into the future, because after I'd ripped
Orinoco Flow, the CD drive started playing again. Whatever it was that went wrong, it went wrong for a week, and then went right again all by itself -- but it was too late. I never again carried that book with its protective CD sleeves. I've still got it somewhere if you want it.
Whatever I used, doubtlessly I grabbed iTunes when it came out. That means this is the 14th year I've been using this application; I'm not sure there is anything else I've used that long, apart from Mail.
It also means that I rather grew up with iTunes: I was there from the start, and that that makes a big difference. I may not remember exactly when certain features were added, but to me, that's what they were: an addition. Usually a very useful addition, if sometimes an expensive one, like the iTunes Store.
If you come to iTunes now, though, I can see that it is a mass of functions and confusion. The music player is now where you also buy movies, it's where you had to plug your iPhone in, but now not unless you want to. You can download iOS apps to it, but can't do anything with them. You cannot download Mac apps to iTunes, even though you could use those -- you have to go through the separate Mac App Store for that.
So I get it. When people complain that iTunes is a mess, I get it. I can't disagree, yet I do disagree, and I still like iTunes. Maybe I'm just too nice: I like iTunes Radio too, and truly can't fathom why I read about it being so bad it must die.
Speaking of iTunes Radio, though, if you want to make iTunes even more of an incomprehensible mess, get yourself two iTunes accounts. Preferably a US and a UK one. It's difficult to do, and a true bag of wrenches on your head when you have them both, because you and iTunes will both go cross-eyed. Yet overall, it's been worth it to me because I'm in the UK, where iTunes Radio has yet to launch at all. Plus, the US iTunes Store has a lot more free material: come September and the TV season, it regularly puts pilot episodes out for nothing. I cannot tell you how much money I've spent following series that I initially saw that free pilot. I'm looking at you,
Leverage.
It's iTunes Radio that got me into streaming: then it is specifically how iTunes Radio won't let you specifiy an album or an artist (unless you have iTunes Match) that got me looking at Pandora and Spotify and the rest. I'm not at the stage where I'm sufficiently into this to pick a service and pay a subscription, but it is iTunes Radio that opened me up to the idea, and it is iTunes Radio that introduced me to some new music.
Consequently, I now go in waves of looking for new material and retreating back into my own collection. I've recently had to research alternative music players, and there's a lot to like in them, but the real result has been that I've rediscovered my own music.
My library has 10,248 songs. That's not a fair count, because I have a lot of
Doctor Who radio dramas in that, plus a lot of interviews I've recorded. Today I don't use iTunes for any audio work, because I can do all I need through my various audio recording and editing apps, but over the years I've accrued a lot of telephone interview tracks. I should do something about that. Yet weeding through your iTunes library isn't a lot of fun.
Especially not when you see how many tracks don't have any artwork. I've gone through phases of working hard to fill in those gaps through various utilities, through iTunes's own artwork features, I've even grabbed JPEGs and scans and run them through Photoshop to get the size right. I have no idea how I found the time, and I can see that I plainly didn't find enough time, as there are still so many toothless gaps.
That bugs me. It bugs me a lot when an album contains one track with a guest artist and now that's treated as a separate album. That's not iTunes's fault per se, it's more to do with how someone has entered the CD's details in the Gracenote CD database, but iTunes uses that database.
Still, iTunes also uses Smart Playlists, and I have a lot of these. A lot. I'm a bit patchy over it, but I have often created a list that just includes any track added this year. So I have a 2010 playlist, for instance, and it is entertaining to see what I added then, what I've come to love from then, and what I've come to forget. It falls down a bit because 2010's list includes a lot of those interviews, and that's not fun on shuffle.
Mind you, the number of times iTunes has shuffled from Bruce Springsteen into Act 2 of the BBC Radio 4 production of
King Lear is startling, and I do like that.
I also like telling iTunes to give me an hour's worth of music that I haven't played in a year. I like taking a lunch break and watching an episode of Lou Grant. I don't like that the iTunes Store holds only the first three seasons of that show, but there has literally been no other way to get even that number of episodes of this series.
I don't like that I have to think now about whether I should back up my iPad to iTunes on my Mac or solely through the cloud. I have never in my life found any use whatsoever for the thing where it will display pretty light patterns as you listen. I didn't find any use for Ping when that came and went.
Yet iTunes is where I turn to, it is where my music lives. In researching alternatives and testing a new product lately, I had reason to dig out some old CDs, and it happened again. Enya's album is long gone, but I held Suzanne Vega's first album in my hand and it felt weird. Good weird, but weird. I had originally bought that album on vinyl, then I had bought it again on CD. Yet now the concept that music ever came in a physical form is peculiar.
For me, that's entirely because of iTunes.
-- William Gallagher (
@WGallagher)
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