Having been a fan of 3rd party music player applications like Winamp for Windows (in place of the default and DRM-ridden Windows Media Player), I was wary of the default music player that is part of the Mac OS - iTunes. But I made a promise to myself that I was going to give the inherent applications a try, so I copied my entire mp3 collection (2265 songs and counting) onto the MacBook to import into iTunes. The process was uneventful, if not lengthy - it seems iTunes does a measure of processing on the songs it imports into the library. After I was playing around on the MacBook for a while, I noticed that a lot of hard drive space was in use that I couldn't account for. At first, I chalked it up to my video project, but even after that was finished and deleted, I still couldn't account for all the used space. By accident, I discovered that when you import music into iTunes, it actually copies the files into a particular folder. So I ended up with 2 copies of all my music and didn't even realize it. Once I realized that peculiarity, I just deleted the original files and presto - there was all my space back. Just a tip to any new Mac iTunes users.As far as usability is concerned, no problems to report yet, but I don't buy my music from the iTunes store, so I shouldn't have to deal with any DRM woes. I'll let you know if I discover anything else worth reporting about iTunes.
3 comments:
Two thing: 1) iTunes gives you the option of either "organizing" your tunes into its own folder (hence the redundant copies) or just referencing files wherever they are on your hard drive. In Windows it's under Preferences->Advanced.
2) The iTunes store is starting to sell some DRM-free music at a slight surcharge, and will likely be DRM-free within a year if Jobs has his way. Still: eMusic and zunior provide a good DRM-free option for the less-commercial artists that gives far more $ back to the artists (versus the distributor/pimp) when you buy their music, and would be my first choice...
Thanks Rob.
A recent update - Universal is exploring selling DRM-free music:
http://www.infoworld.com/article/07/08/10/Universal-DRM-free-music_1.html
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