Tuesday, November 11

Music

Ok, here's the deal. I've got a non-ipod portable music player. It was cheap, we've had it a few years. Getting music from my CD collection to the music player is pretty straight forward. I put it in the computer, let media player rip it and load it on. But here's where it gets messy.

We also like to occasionally buy music from itunes. It's convenient, easy, cheap and people sometimes like to give us gift cards. But to get the music from itunes to my music player, as far as I know I've got to burn them to a CD, then rip them with media player and life is once again good.

But wait, I'd rather use itunes to listen to music on my computer. Media player is . . . well, made my microsoft. So now I'm going through my media player files and loading them into itunes, which consists of itunes making another copy of them in the itunes format. So, I end up with two copies of every music file on my computer.

I'm not hurting for hard drive space, and everything works fine. But this is all a whole lot of nuisance.

4 comments:

Em said...

two copies are better than none.

Ben said...

Obviously, I have a vested interest in pointing you toward the header comment here: http://xkcd.com/488.

But ITunes will play MP3's so I'm not sure why you need to have them in the ITunes format.

Clark said...

I haven't really delved into the issue much. This is one of those things that I care about enough to complain, but not enough to really try hard to solve the situation. (At least, I haven't tried yet.) I believe that media player rips into WMA format, not MP3. And it wouldn't surprise me at all that itunes won't play WMA. But again, I'm not sure.

Thanks for the xkcd comic, I'd forgotten about that one.

Ben said...

So, you can set up Media Player to rip to MP3. There are a number of advantages to this, but you'd end up having to rip them all again :(