Category: music

Only a few days after upgrading 200+ songs to iTunes Plus, I went back again today, and found another almost 200 songs to upgrade. The biggest chunk there is the complete Led Zeppelin, which I bought for $99 a while ago, and will now cost me about $30 more to upgrade. I’ve noticed that the songs are downloading pretty quickly, but the bit where it says “processing file” right after the download is taking quite a long time on each song. I have no clue why that is, but whatever it is, it’s going to take a long time to get all that Led Zep converted to iTunes Plus.

I spent a little over $50 yesterday upgrading my iTunes library to the DRM-free iTunes Plus. I had 219 songs upgraded. I feel a bit like a chump for paying Apple so much money just to get DRM-free, slightly higher bitrate, versions of stuff I’ve already paid for. But it’s a one-time thing, and I like the idea of having the DRM-free tracks. In practice, I don’t think it’s going to make much difference though. I listen to my music primarily on my iPod, or through my CD player, so the DRM never got in my way.

It took a surprisingly long time to download all the new tracks. I had to quit the download last night, so I could turn off the computer and go to bed. I picked it up again this morning, and I think it ran for a few hours at least. It was still running when I left for work, so I’m not sure. The download process does an OK job of replacing the old tracks with the new ones, but it didn’t move all the old tracks out of the way like it should have. I had to go in and clean out about 50 tracks manually.

I wish Apple would have come up with a good way of automating the replacement of the old tracks on a second computer, though. To get the new tracks from my desktop to my laptop, I had to attach to the desktop, put together a “smart folder” to pull the new tracks together, copy them to the laptop, move them into the library, then delete the old versions manually for *all* the tracks. That was a bit of a pain. And there’s no way to fix existing playlists, to replace the old tracks with the new ones, so now I have a bunch of empty, or nearly empty, playlists. Well, it was probably time I cleaned up some of my old playlists anyway.

Okay, the Genius playlist thing is actually pretty fun. Here’s a playlist I got from “Quiet As A Mouse” by Margot & The Nuclear So & So’s. This one was off my MacBook rather than my PC.

Well, my desktop Vista machine finally finished chugging through its “Genius” stuff. Just for yuks, I hit the Genius button on “Why Henry Drinks”, by Drive-By Truckers, and iTunes gave me a pretty awesome playlist, which I’d like to paste here, but I’m having trouble exporting the playlist to a format that I can easily paste into Blogger’s editor. The best I can do right now is a screenshot:

I’ve upgraded all of my home computers to iTunes 8 today. My desktop Vista machine is still running through the “Genius” setup, which apparently takes a long time when you run it on a large library. My one pet peeve with iTunes 8 is that there is no longer a preference pane setting to turn off the Genre column in the browser. It can still be turned off though, using this hint. That worked fine on the Mac, but I’m not sure how to translate that to the PC. It’s probably a registry setting or something. I’ll have to play around with it later.

Meanwhile, I can’t seem to download app updates for my iPod Touch from iTunes right now. I’m hoping that’s a temporary glitch related to the iTunes 8 rollout. I’ve got two apps that need to be updated. I’ll have to take a look at that again tomorrow.

One more Apple-related note: I ordered a refurbished Apple TV unit today. I was motivated by the availability of Battlestar Galactica in HD on the iTunes store. I never got around to watching any of BSG season 4 off my Tivo, and now the first few episodes have disappeared. (Apparently, I ran out of room at some point, and they were dropped.) The quality on my Tivo Series 2 isn’t great anyway. I don’t mind paying $30 or so to get the whole season in HD, and without commercials or those annoying crawls for Ghost Hunters or whatever else SciFi is plugging. Oh, and with the Apple TV, I’ll finally be able to watch Torchwood season 2 on my TV. I downloaded that from iTunes while I was in San Diego, and I watched the first episode on my laptop, but I haven’t gotten around to watching any more of them.