We've got a 288A in progress, send backup. (Sorry Ryan, yet another nonsense title)

First things first. I like making the titles to my post bits of pop culture trivia. They don't tell you anything about the post itself, but hopefully they're interesting. It won't change, so I guess it doesn't matter either way. Now, on to the content.

iTunes is a wonderful thing. I didn't really think this the first few times I used it. I downloaded it as soon as it was available for Windows, but I really didn't care for the user experience at first. I kept it installed simply as a frontend to the iTunes music store where I could purchase music. At the time, I was actually very much liking Windows Media Player. Version 9 was a very good player, and version 10 seemed very nice as well. I liked that it was built-in (No, bundling is not bad in all cases, more on this later...) and didn't require me to install anything extra, and also felt it did everything I needed a player to do.

Over time, I somehow started using iTunes more, and realized that I had stopped using Media Player altogether. I found that once I stopped trying to listen to music the way I thought that I should, and just let iTunes handle everything, everything just became much simpler. I was now able to simply enjoy my music, and found myself forgetting about the software entirely. That is the sign of well written software. I realized at that point too that Media Player was lacking a great deal, and no longer came anywhere near meeting my needs.

I like having all of my music available in the library at all times. Smart playlists make this experience even better, it's about time somebody created an interface like that. Mix and match as many rules as I see fit to tailor my music. Streamlined manipulation of ID3 data and album art. All of the features I had come to expect from a media player as well. It's all good.

I recently found a program called EvilLyrics that provided the ability to display lyrics of the currently playing song as well. Very slick. They provide the hooks into iTunes through a plugin called MultiPlugin. This plugin also changes the taskbar window to show the current song, can skin the titlebar, and all sorts of other cool stuff. I would really like to see the iTunes plugin scene explode, much as I love Firefox extensions.

The few things I would like to see yet in iTunes:

• Ability to auto-populate/auto-correct the ID3 data and album art for my songs.
• Monitor given folders for new music, and add it to the Music Library automatically.
• Filter the Music Library with filters that look like Smart Playlists.

I'm sure there are others I have thought of in the past, but I can't recall now. I will update this list from time to time, and if I find a way to accomplish one of these tasks, I will post that also. Stay Black Burt.