iTunes Therefore I Am
By Gavin Miller – March 2008.
For my twelfth birthday my parents gave me a double cassette deck. In my adolescent mind that was a better present than a pushbike and a pony combined. I spent countless hours using and abusing that machine making compilation cassettes for my Walkman. It was not unusual for me to fall asleep listening to one of my mix-tapes and wake up in the middle of the night with the headphone chord wrapped around my neck. I have no idea what happened to that cassette deck. It now resides in that special secret place where all your childhood belongings end up, wherever that is.
Around twenty years later I discovered iTunes and the way I collected and consumed music was forever changed. Instead of hauling around a box full of mix-tapes I could fill my hard drive with enough songs to fill thousands of cassettes. Even better, I could access any one of those songs in a heartbeat. I am still absolutely enamored by the concept of hearing my own tunes in random order. I almost always have iTunes running at home and it is forever serving me up one brilliant musical surprise after another.
I would like to think I know my way around iTunes pretty well by now, so on the off chance you haven’t already discovered these features by yourself, allow me to share some of my discoveries within iTunes with you. (All of my instructions are for Mac users. I despise PC’s and therefore do not offer tech support for them. If you use a PC you will probably still be able to figure it out. I think substituting the Apple key for the Control key will work in most cases. What will definitely work is ditching the PC and buying a Mac. Trust me, you will feel love for an inanimate object the likes of which you have never felt before.)
For starters there’s album cover art. This is the only art I really get, because it’s the art I grew up with. When I see the cover of Pink Floyd’s Dark Side Of The Moon it sparks off all sorts of memories. On the other hand, when I see a painting by Vincent Van Gough, I generally feel nothing. The best way I have found to get your hands on just about every album cover ever produced is via a widget (it’s a Mac thing) called The Amazon Album Art Finder. Download this baby for free, stick it on your Dashboard (again, the Mac users know what I mean) and use it to find the cover for whatever is selected from your iTunes library at the time. I’m sure there’s a much more convoluted way for PC users to do the same thing but I have no intention of ever figuring that out.
The next tip for living is Apple + I which will give you an information screen for whatever track is highlighted at the time. You can do all sorts of weird and wonderful things using this feature, including setting the individual volume for that track and even setting the in and out times. This is particularly handy for those tracks that sometimes show up on the end of albums containing a song followed by six minutes of nothing followed by a bonus track. You can set the out time to be the end of the actual track and you no longer have to put up with hearing six minutes of bugger all, as iTunes instead moves straight on to the next song. Apple + I also lets you change the tracking information, insert lyrics or artwork manually, or if you want to be really pedantic, set the equalizer for each individual track.
Smart Playlists are another stroke of iTunes genius. From the File menu choose new Smart Playlist, and go nuts setting the rules for your listening experience. For example you might want a Smart Playlist that only contains songs that are over six minutes in duration, but no Bob Dylan songs, and nothing that has already been played more than twice. Use the drop down menu to set these parameters, hitting the + key after setting each one, then hit OK when you’re finished and your new Smart Playlist will appear. It will also update live, meaning that if you were to make a Smart Playlist and make the only parameter “Play Count Is Zero” your Smart Playlist will shrink my one track each time something is played, eventually dwindling down to nothing. I have a Smart Playlist called “As Yet Unplayed” which does exactly that. I have another one called “One Year Ago” for songs that I haven’t played in iTunes in over a year, and another one called “New Unplayed” for songs I have added this year but not played in their entirety yet.
Now, here’s the best tip of the lot. To many this will seem screamingly obvious, but I am constantly amazed by how many people I talk to who haven’t figured this bit out yet. Go to the Preferences menu, click on Advanced Preferences, then click Burning, then choose either MP3 or Data Disc. You can now burn around 10 hours of MP3 files onto a standard CD. So if your car stereo plays MP3’s, as most of the new ones do, you can now start making MP3 CD compilations for the car.
If I were asked to pick one invention from my lifetime that has rocked my world, iTunes would be it. These days when I buy a CD I bring it home, put it in my Mac, import it into my iTunes, read the liner notes as I listen to it for the first time, then file the CD away quite possibly never to be opened again. So does this mean there is no need for CD’s, LP’s and cassettes any more? Hardly.
Once when I needed some cash I sold my collection of vinyl and I have regretted it ever since. Sure, I have since replaced all the songs I had on vinyl with MP3 versions of exactly the same songs in my iTunes library, but it’s just not the same as having the actual albums. In this new century the LP has become a fascinating relic of times gone by. That’s why I can’t ever see myself getting rid of my cassette collection, and that’s despite not even owning a cassette player anymore. I don’t even have one in my car these days. In fact, there’s only one cassette deck left in the entire building at 96FM. But I’m keeping my cassettes. Forever. I have too many great memories wrapped up in those mix-tapes to ever throw them away, even if I have nothing to play them on. Who knows, maybe that double cassette deck will show up again one day.