Brief Thoughts on iTunes before bed....
Oct. 27th, 2005 09:53 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
oneirophreniaOnce, a long time ago, I bought four tracks from the iTunes Music Store: Beck's 4-track EP of Nintendo Nanoloop remixes from Guero (the Hell Yes EP, which is actually 19,000X cooler than the album itself). I only bought them because they were only available from iTunes and I couldn't find them anywhere else online. I immediately stripped the bullshit DRM out of them and converted them to actual mp3s instead of Apple's fucking retarded "AAC" format, and then I never visited the iTunes Music Store again. And I never will.
Yet I still zoom on over to download every new version of iTunes the second it comes out. Why?
'Cause it's just an awesome mp3 player. The end. I love what you can do with playlists, library and tag management, and catalogueing, and that's about it. It does what I need it to do and it does it very, very well....The fact that the music store lurks behind it is completely and utterly irrelevant to me. As is the fact that it syncs to iPods. I don't have an iPod and probably never will, as I just have no use for one. But, damn, I love the program's interface and functionality. That's prettymuch why I use it and fucking love it.
I have heard criticism--very valid criticism, in fact--that it's ridiculous that a media player in this day and age only plays mp3s (and "AACs," as if anyone actually cares) and not OGGs, MPCs, and all the billion other compression formats Out There. Eh. I could care less. Any time I acquire files in Ogg Vorbis, MusePack, or other formats, I just convert them to mp3 with dBPowerAmp anyway and delete the originals. Sound quality means nothing to me since I absolutely cannot tell the difference between an mp3 encoded at, say, 192 or 256kbps and an OGG encoded at the same. Now, I encode all my acoustic and classical music at 256kbps or higher simply because I can notice the difference with that type of music--but for anything and everything else, 192 or, at most, 256 is good enough. And mp3 is compatible with EVERYTHING ON EARTH. Who the hell ever heard of a car CD player that plays OGG CDs? Right. No one. Hence, I find those other formats completely useless.
And that's prettymuch it.
Yet I still zoom on over to download every new version of iTunes the second it comes out. Why?
'Cause it's just an awesome mp3 player. The end. I love what you can do with playlists, library and tag management, and catalogueing, and that's about it. It does what I need it to do and it does it very, very well....The fact that the music store lurks behind it is completely and utterly irrelevant to me. As is the fact that it syncs to iPods. I don't have an iPod and probably never will, as I just have no use for one. But, damn, I love the program's interface and functionality. That's prettymuch why I use it and fucking love it.
I have heard criticism--very valid criticism, in fact--that it's ridiculous that a media player in this day and age only plays mp3s (and "AACs," as if anyone actually cares) and not OGGs, MPCs, and all the billion other compression formats Out There. Eh. I could care less. Any time I acquire files in Ogg Vorbis, MusePack, or other formats, I just convert them to mp3 with dBPowerAmp anyway and delete the originals. Sound quality means nothing to me since I absolutely cannot tell the difference between an mp3 encoded at, say, 192 or 256kbps and an OGG encoded at the same. Now, I encode all my acoustic and classical music at 256kbps or higher simply because I can notice the difference with that type of music--but for anything and everything else, 192 or, at most, 256 is good enough. And mp3 is compatible with EVERYTHING ON EARTH. Who the hell ever heard of a car CD player that plays OGG CDs? Right. No one. Hence, I find those other formats completely useless.
And that's prettymuch it.
