Lindsay’s new iPod, and Maclean’s recent article prompted me to put together my thoughts on Apple’s iTunes.
First off, iTunes and the iPod work with both the Mac and the PC. The iPod works a little better with Firewire than USB 1 and 2, but most PCs these days finally have firewire and USB 2 isn’t that bad. The iPods are expensive, they hold a lot more than all the other MP3 players, but they are expensive BUT iTunes is free at iTunes.com, now let me convince me.
The hands down biggest feature of the iTunes music jukebox is it’s search features.
Type something in the search box and instantly all the results are there, and as each key is pressed the results are narrowed. So as I type ‘tr’ I see all the ‘travis’ and ‘the tragically hip’ music I have, then as I type the ‘a’ for ‘tra’ I see just the ‘tragically hip’ music. Imagine the satisfaction of finding the song that was stuck in your head with no more than four keystrokes.
A feature I really appreciate is the music sharing. Through a technology known as zeroconfig, which Apple re-branded Rendezvous, iTunes can find music on other computers in the same network. It’s an easy, legal, way to play your own music in a deferent room in the house. Shouldn’t be hard, an LP could do that, but try it with any other jukebox. I have over 50GB of music, so I use this feature and a open source program called daapd to create a shared music server on my linux server, which has enough storage for that much music. It also allows me to play my own music at work. Most of that music is either in MP3 or Apple’s AAC, which is just MPEG4 (which means better quality and high compression). More info here.
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