My Slice of Reality,

You watch softly, waiting for his attention
The feelings are the same but I don’t understand
How can you live hiding your love T.a.t.u

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I was in a fit of upgrading the other day, what with all the recent upgrades to my Logitech MX Duo wireless desktop, new version of Knoppix and installing three new 40Gb hard drives into my tower. After transferring my mp3 collection into the new drives I figured why not finally look at iTunes? I’d heard some really good things about it from a few other blogs I read, so in for the penny, in for the pound.

First of all, why the hell does it insist on installing QuickTime on my system? Couldn’t it see that it was already there? The only reason I have QuickTime on the system in the first place is because of movie trailers, if not for that I’d have ditched it like a two dollar whore years ago. So, I’m through the install and it asks if I want it to catalogue my media or some silly nuisance, I tell it sure and…it proceeds to move all my mp3 under its directory.

A little side note here, my mp3 collection takes over 40 CDs (at last attempt), in a Rar file, to backup. Its now approaching 40Gb in size, almost 7,000 mp3 and it proceeded to move them…all. The blue screen of death was rather shocking but not wholly unexpected under the circumstances. Never, ever, ever try and attempt to move 40Gb of data while compressing your Outlook mailbox while burning a CD when the hard drives are on the same chain feeding data to the burner and while listening to said mp3 in Foobar. Well, at least don’t do it on my computer.

Did I mention the pretty blue screen?

So, once the system finished rebooting itself I fixed my mp3 collection (stupid directory structure got fubar’d), uninstalled iTunes and tried again. This time I learned from my previous mistake (quite rare) but upon loading and telling it to add my mp3 to its list, but not import them, it then proceeded to scan the volume of every song in my collection.

This took, oh, a little over three hours. I will give Apple props though, they did provide feedback on what it was doing but who in gods name creates a system that can’t be cancelled?

At this point I was frustrated, very frustrated. From the ranting and ravings of the lunatic Mac fringe, iTunes is gods gift to mp3 lists. I’ve heard almost the same thing from quite a few Windows users and I couldn’t help but wonder, was I using the same freaking program? It almost destroyed my mp3 collection! Twice!*

Besides the terrible install and normalization of my music files, I actually like iTunes. I like its filtering and search capabilities, its random function actually works, and the rating function and abilities to play based upon rankings or genres. I haven’t even gotten into creating the advanced, dynamic playlists that it seems iTunes can support. Basically, I really like iTunes while using it but I’ve run into probably the show stopper problem.

Its not responsive. When I say non-responsive, I mean you can click on the window and it’ll select iTunes but it won’t do anything within that window for at least fifteen seconds. Even worse if you happen to click on an element within the GUI. I haven’t heard of the problem from anyone else but it can’t be resource related. I have a gig of RAM, a 1.4ghz processor and a decently fast I/O system. I so want to like iTunes (negating the whole purchasing aspect of it) but the fact that I can’t skip songs for 15-30 seconds in means its just no usable. Where’s the refinement that Apple’s supposedly so good for?

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