iTunes

Just got back from getting my hair cut over at “A Cut Above”. I’m sure that is jealous. :)

It was snowing this morning, coming down pretty good for awhile and it started to stick to the streets. If it kept up it probably would have caused some accumulation, even on the roads. I love snow…

So after hearing reports from friends that iTunes 4 is better at handling large numbers of files, I decided to drag my MP3 share (mounted via SMB from my file server) onto it’s window and let it index all my songs (but I’m still not interested in letting it manage the files and directory format for me). It took about 45 minutes to index 13684 songs, weighing in at 66.02GB, which according to iTunes is 40.8 days of music. iTunes takes a few seconds to start up, nothing unbearable given the hugeness of my music archive.. Searches are surprisingly fast and scrolling the index is “fast enough”. But what is unbelievably awful is adding to the archive. If I drag a single new album onto “Library” to add it to iTunes’ database it takes upwards of 10 seconds PER SONG. I guess I’d rather the pinch-point be on database insertion, but it still seems ridiculously slow… The one nice thing about having all this stuff in iTunes, though, is that it makes it easy for me to find missing/incomplete id3 tags in my collection. It is going to take me awhile to fix the thousands of incomplete tags, but at least I know where to start now.

As far as the features of iTunes that everyone raves about, namely smart playlists and the like, I am not sold.. But perhaps over time this will change…. I wish more organization was available for playlists (folders, etc). I have the same gripe with iPhoto, I have tons of folders to organize my photos, but I wish I could organize the folders into some kind of logical hierarchy.

I am still not interested in having an application manage my music for me. But it is nice to know that iTunes 4 performs a bit better than it’s predecessors. And as long as I don’t let iTunes manage my actual music files but instead catalog them it seems a bit less annoying to me.