How one little program will change your (musical) life
Another year is upon us... for some, though, a new experience has just begun. Today's column is written for the latter peers of mine, specifically focusing on the incoming students. My little corner of campus is reserved for technical questions, difficulties and advice—if you have a question, I'll do what I can to solve it.
With pleasantries aside, the topic of the day: music. I've talked about digital music and the future due to the RIAA (Recording Industry Association of America) before, but what happens once you actually have your horde of music ready to be enjoyed? In other words, how in the world can you easily organize and manage thousands of songs?
The new atmosphere initiated by Apple, with the release of its glossy white iPod several years ago, has dramatically increased the transition from optical music (traditional CDs) to digital (MP3, WMA, AAC, Ogg, etc). With this change, the days of switching from disc to disc are over, replaced by the computer and portable MP3 player. Some might disagree with my proposal, but whether on PC or Mac, the best audio library solution (to date) remains the partner-in-crime to the iPod: Apple's iTunes.
iTunes, available as a free download from Apple, can automatically find, collect and organize all digital music on your computer. If ripped from a CD or purchased through the iTunes Music Store, every song will include detailed information: artist, album, year released, genre, and possibly even the original album art. If acquired from [cough] other sources, you might be required to enter this information manually. Regardless, iTunes can work with various sorts of data, so logically my next step is to tell you of all the magical tricks it can perform.
iTunes comes with several pre-configured playlists, but they are mostly useless. (You can delete a playlist by right-clicking on the name and choosing "Delete," or by just clicking on the name and pressing the same key on your keyboard.) Starting from scratch, there is the traditional specificy-each-song-individually playlist, as well as a spiffy Smart Playlist, which will grab songs on-the-fly, without your intervention, depending on the criteria you set up. These criteria are based on the song information I listed before (i.e. genre, artist, composer) as well as more proprietary data (when it was last played, your custom rating [out of five stars], how many times it was played).
Creating a new Smart Playlist is easy: go to File > New Smart Playlist. A pop-up will prompt you for various criteria, where you can select from every data field and several comparison methods. Setting the first box to "Artist" and the second to "is not" will allow you to prevent this playlist from including a specific artist, such as Journey. To add or remove a specific condition, click on the plus or minus symbols on the right of each line.
iTunes is more than just a music library, and the examples above are only a fraction of just that one function—spend some time looking into shared libraries (which will allow you to play and browse the music libraries of other iTunes users on your network), party shuffle and the iTunes Music Store (99¢ for a song or $9.99 for an entire album) are all interesting features.
Stepping away from iTunes for a second, let me add a disclaimer: iTunes is not the only (or necessarily the best) music organizer available. In fact, WinAmp is capable of almost everything iTunes is, and is also a free download from the mystical world of the Internet. However, iTunes is the easiest and simplest to learn and use. The interface is straight forward, the buttons are friendly, and it works on both Mac and PC machines. Oh, and I use it, and since this is my column—I make the decisions.
So, there you have it. Returning and incoming students alike, anyone looking for a way to make sense of the music collection now has a solution. Any questions or difficulties, your local tech geek is here, and I promise that no matter how complex or confusing your situation is, I promise to pretend that I care.