Fun With iTunes. And Not.

As you Hucklebugsters out there will hear about this week, I spent a goodly (if five straight hours is indeed goodly) amount of time into the wee hours of Monday morning playing with iTunes.

Now, I've had iTunes for about a year. I wasn't so jazzed about getting it, though everyone told me it was the way to go as far as a listening/cataloging device was concerned. I'd just used it as a downloading system, then listened to everything in good old Music Match. Music Match always worked well for me, and we were buddies. At least we were buddies up until the time MM decided to turn on me and do some very hateful things, like refuse to play or burn to CD the songs I'd downloaded from iTunes. I felt betrayed by this, and decided to end my friendship with Music Match and kick him to the curb, or at least off my computer, and so I tried to forge a little better friendship with iTunes.

And it was OK. New friendships are always a little tough at first, and there were some things I didn't really like about iTunes, but nice people like Stennie & Mike (Man of Mystery and Movies) told me how to change things around to where the two of us would be more compatible, and I was settling into the iTunes way of doing things.

But then, the First Great CD Mix Exchange came along, and I found myself in something of a quagmire. See, as you iTuners know, you "import" songs. From your CDs, or other places on your computer. And because some of my imports were from home-made CDs or CDs by people on extremely independent labels not recognized by iTunes, my library had become a, well, what the more refined of us would call a "big-ass mess." Songs had no titles nor artists attached to them, and had such descriptive titles as "Track 1," "Track 6," "Track 24," and so on. I probably had about 18 "Track 6" entries, and 14 "Track 2" songs, and you get the idea.

So when I was putting together the Mix Exchange playlist, I'd have to identify those songs by their times. I wrote it all down on a sheet of paper. "Oooh, OK, this song is 'Track 6' and 3:12 long, and this one is 'Track 6' and 2:49 long.'" This gets very old very quickly.

The CD Mix Exchange came and went, and wasn't it fun for us all, and I didn't really give it much more thought. Until a week or so ago, when the Second Great CD Mix Exchange was announced and I started putting together my song list. And I just couldn't bear the thought of all that "Track 6" crap.

So on Saturday I pushed up my sleeves, which is a lie because I was wearing short sleeves, and started reading the iTunes "Help" section. And I learned how to re-title songs. Now, as I remarked to Stenns last night, this is something akin to making the blazing announcement that one has learned to tie one's shoelaces, but it was still an exciting moment for me. So I re-titled a few tracks and headed off to B'burg, heady with my newfound technological skills.

Then on Sunday when I was back home, the recipe du jour was made, or built, and Picture Sunday was up, I headed over to iTunes to do some by-God cleaning. And that's where the five hours came in.

And I had a blast. I'm one of these people who dread a task, like cleaning house, or reorganizing kitchen drawers, but once I get into it I'm generally happy to do it. And that's kind of how the iTunes thing went. I sat down saying, "Man, I'm going to have to go through all these things, it'll take forever, I'll get confused," and - well, five hours passed and I basically didn't realize it until I looked down at the clock in dismay.

I went to the untitled tracks and began giving them titles and attaching artists to them. Of course, this involved playing those tracks, at least parts of them, and of course when the good music gets going, it's just a party waiting to happen, even if it's only a party of one. I got all those done, then realized I had several tracks in iTunes two or three or even more times. (Hey, I love "The Clarinet Polka," but do I really need the same version in there three times? I say unto you, "No!") I consulted my maven Stennie about this, and she assured me I could delete one track at a time without deleting my entire library, something I must admit I didn't believe her on the first go-around, but of course she was right, and I started getting rid of the extras. Then I deleted stuff I didn't want anymore, samples of songs people had sent me and stuff I really (I mean, really) only needed to hear one time in my life.

And through it all I was saying, "Hey, I'd forgotten all about this," and play a song, then another, and I was having a high old time.

Then I decided that I was going to attach some genres to certain tracks just like iTunes said I could. I had a bunch of stuff from the wonderful bygone days of Napster that was labeled not by song, but by category. Like "Fun: Beck - Loser," and "Cigarettes: Brownsville Station - Smokin' in the Boys' Room," and "Memory Lane: Boz Scaggs - It's Over." I wanted to be able to see songs by their old groupings again, so I gave out genres. Bluegrass, jazz, guilty pleasures, memory lane, comedy, covers, 50s, pop, horrid (Bobby Goldsboro's "Honey" fit nicely in that one), fun, clarinet, German. And I completed that as well.

Funny thing, though. Some of the songs already had genres that iTunes had attached to them. And some of them were intriguing, to say the least. The comedy classic "The Irish Ballad," by Tom Lehrer, was somehow a blues song. Joe "King" Carrasco's Tex-Mex New Wave Dance Stomper "Chicano Town" was labelled as a country song. And anything Bela Fleck did, even the most hoein' down of numbers, was called jazz.

Anyway, I had a ball, listened to all kinds of songs, and spent way too long at my computer. I finished up around 4:30 Monday morning. And I went to bed with a decidedly sinking feeling. Because after all that cataloging and listening and dancing in my chair, I realized something. I didn't like my already-set choices for the new CD mix. The songlist I promised myself that was set in stone at that point, that I would make myself be happy with, was not making me happy anymore. And now I'm retooling the entire thing.

I think about these things way too much, you know. Not that I'm hinky or anything. Never hinky. Nope, not me.

I'll have it done when the time comes, though, I promise.

Betland's Olympic Update:
* By the way, acro took the holiday off. The acrobasket was spending one last day at the beach. He likes the beach, you know. He's quite brown.
* First Community Band practice of the season tonight!