I use iTunes a lot.
I listen to a lot of music; lately a lot of them have been coming from podcasts because I’ve all but given up on radio. Radio is still good for news and right-wing demagoguery, but it sucks for music. I finally had enough of it this summer when my formerly favorite radio station (out of San Francisco, which I could never pull in from Santa Cruz) changed its format from listener contributions to top-20 hits… from the nineties, the decade when Rush Limbaugh destroyed radio.
I’ll side-rant on that for a moment. Limbaugh frequently claims he saved AM radio. Before his national show hit the airwaves, nobody was bothering to listen to it anymore. Radio talk shows consisted of various local hosts—either right-wing nutjobs or left-wing nutjobs—who spent more time trying to find out what callers thought. Limbaugh never cared about what his callers thought; his show is about what he thinks. It’s a simple idea—but really, no one else was doing it at the time, and certainly not at a national level, and not with a conservative.
But Limbaugh’s ratings made the station owners realize: What really did they need local talent for? Why customize everything for the local listeners when it was cheaper and easier to homogenize everything for the masses, and spread it over a network? And this attitude spread to the rest of radio, and verily radio began to suck. Hard.
So if I’m going to listen to music, it’ll be through iTunes. Or my iPod, which requires iTunes. If I’m at my computer, I plug my iPod into iTunes and listen to it through my computer. It’s nice.
Now between all the uploading and downloading between the thousands of songs and hundreds of podcasts I listen to (and the one that I make), there's also the school’s network. This allows anyone else on the network—who has iTunes—to see what I have there. (They can’t see onto the iPod, which is where I keep all the good stuff.) They can listen to all the podcasts and podsafe music I download.
…And they can also gum up the works.
Every once in a while, I get a new CD to add to my collection, and want to rip the thing so I can listen to it on my iPod. So I pop it into the computer, and iTunes becomes inaccessible. It’s still there; it’s still playing; but I can’t get it to do anything. Every time I move the cursor over it I get the Mac OS spinning beachball. So I hit force-quit… and the program tells me that I have listeners. There are people listening to my iTunes. That’s why it's not functioning properly. God bless ’em for caring, but they’re monkeying with my computer.
So lately I’ve just been unplugging the ethernet cable. Then iTunes magically begins to work again, I get my stuff done, and plug the computer back in. And somewhere out there on the network, some poor schmuck is annoyed because I went offline in the middle of the good part of the song.
Can’t be helped. It’s my computer, dangit, and sometimes I need it back.
Update 10/12/2005. And now with the new iTunes 6 I just downloaded, it’s acting stranger. But the new downloadable videos are cool. I just downloaded that Fatboy Slim video where Christopher Walken dances all over the hotel. That’s always fun to watch… just wish it wasn’t so jerky on my iBook.