Thursday, November 5, 2009

Item: New version of iTunes actually worth downloading!

Every few weeks or so, iTunes alerts me that it has a new version that I simply MUST download. I usually put this off until my iTunes crashes, at which point I bite the bullet and wait 15 minutes for this "new" version - that's exactly like the old one -to start taking up space on my hardrive.

The latest version actually looked a little different, and I noticed that when I plug in my iPod it doesn't immediately go to my iPod, which was a pleasant change, but other than that, I wasn't too impressed.

Until!


Not my iTunes library, though New Order is kinda cool, I guess, as far as "Band's that Started Because the Original Band's Lead Singer Died" go

Until last night when the boyfriend asked me a question about a Lemonheads CD he'd just uploaded. He said he had to fill in all the info for it, because the program didn't recognize the album. It just listed the songs as "Track 01," "Track 02," etc., he typed in the names, but it didn't appear to have uploaded.


But honestly, I stopped listening after he said he'd filled in "all" the information. See, as you may know, when iTunes doesn't recognize an album, and only lists the songs by track number, you usually couldn't put all the information in yourself. You could fill in the song title under the "Name" column, but you couldn't put the artist in under the "Artist" column. It wouldn't let you. A little while back, they started allowing you to put the album name in its appropriate column, but the "Artist" column remained inpenetrable. But there, right in front of me, in the "Artist" column, it said Lemonheads right on down the line, reportedly by the boyfriend's own hand.


This was a revelation! I started going back and properly naming all my albums that had been labeled with all their info (song title, artist and album) in the space reserved for the song name. Suddenly, there was no more confining unrecognized albums to playlists on my iPod to make them easier to find! My copy of Born to Run can live amongst the other Bruce Springsteens albums! Merriweather Post Pavilion can be with the other Animal Collectives! Oh, glorious day!


Now, there is a slight chance that you've been able label a song's title, artist and album for a while now, and I'm just an idiot. In which case ... leave me alone, I might have sinus polyps!


But if I'm right, you've gotta get this new version of iTunes for all your illegal pirate CDs ... I mean, er, all your older CDs that iTunes doesn't recognize. A new day is upon us!!!

4 comments:

Red said...

There was something else I noticed about the new itunes that was cool. Oh! It immediately puts things on your ipod. Like, if you've created a playlist with a bunch of songs already on your ipod, it doesn't go through the effing slow process of "loading" the songs from your playlist. I liked that.

Patrick Harrington said...

Oh Liz.....

Right click on a song, click on Get Info, and you can change any field you want.

You can also hold down the shift button, click on and select 10 songs, then do a right click and Get Info, and then update album / artist / year, etc. for all of them at the same time.

Try right clicking on things - it will change your world.

Liz said...

Haha thanks Pat, another friend of mine alerted me to the magic of right clicking last night. I have lived in darkness for so long!!! Also, my iPod has basically decided to die and I have to send it away to get fixed, so I take back all the nice things I've said about Apple in this post :(

Anonymous said...

HEY! Why are you still using iPod software? . . . you should use the Zune software it's WAY better.

(Try not to notice that i have a vested interest in you using Zune.)

oh, and Hooray Microsoft, boo Apple.

- Im a PC.