I'm enjoying ripping my CDs so I can load them onto my new iPod. The process is surprisingly quick and amazingly simple. I have yet to get into the whole digital music scene because I had this preconception that it was a hassle. I needed special software. It would take a long time. Blah Blah. Well, I don't know where it was that I got that idea. iTunes makes it SO easy.
One of the things that I'm really enjoying is the metadata that iTunes pulls down for all of the songs and albums, specifically the "genre." I'm not quite sure how The Smiths are "alternative & punk" but The Cure is "rock." I wonder where they are getting the controlled vocabulary and who is setting it. I also wonder (since indexing can vary by indexer) if some of my other Cure albums will be tagged differently (I've only ripped one so far). The Barenaked Ladies are classified as both "alternative & punk" and "rock," as they got more mainstream.
Interesting. I LOVE this stuff.
Eee!! I welcome to the wonderful world of ipods and itunes. Isn't it just fantastic?!
I have my eye on the new G5 desktop. I think I'm going to treat myself sometime early next year.
Sadly, iTunes suffers the same problem just about any metadata system does: it pulls data from the old CDDB database, or some decedant thereof. Which means the data is frequently misspelled, miscatagorized and inconsistent. After you've ripped stuff, it's rather beneficial to go through and clean up the metadata, so you don't get things like "Siouxsie And The Banshees" on one album and "Siouxsie & The Banshees" on another.
But yay new laptop! Yay new iPod!