BTW- one thing that I absolutely adore about the Mac is the ease with which I can import audio cd’s. You pop the disc in, press import CD, and then have a sandwich.
Also, I have noticed that the cd reader is exceptionally good. I threw in some cd’s that survived literally every beer bash I threw from 1992-1996 while in undergrad, and it somehow managed to read them, despite the fact that there were scratches and gouges and unidentified substances that could not be removed with anything this side of Mule Kick Drain Cleaner.
My old Dag, Beasties Boys, P-Funk, and White Zombie live again (and surprisingly ebough, my old Adcom amp and pre-amp Paradigm speakers still are in top shape, despite being close to 16 years old). I will let you decide if that is a good thing.
craigie
You must eat fast – the other cool thing is how quickly it rips (off) the CD contents. It just begs you to pop in another disc. And another…
Pisco Sours
John, for even better ripping, I’d highly recommend iTunes-LAME. It creates variable-bit files, so the parts that are less complex take up less room, but you don’t sacrifice as much in sound quality.
Pb
The best program I found out there for that (back in the day) was cdparanoia, but if you’re happy with the job iTunes does, then great!
foxhunter
Holy cow…Adcom. I have a rack of Adcom audio equipment that survived for years. The CD player was the first to go when the head/reader stopped working. The amp finally blew a capacitor a few months ago and it was replaced with one of those all-in-one Onkyo units. The quality of that Adcom was cutting edge at the time albeit pricey.
Punchy
White Zombie might be the most underrated metal band from the 90’s. Check that–it is. The grinding guitar, unintelligible lyrics, and chick on bass….unmatched.
This not having a bad song on it, helps tremendously.
LITBMueller
Back in college in 1994 you just couldn’t beat cranking up “Thunder Kiss ’65” or “Get It Together” while pounding cans of cheap beer.
Ahh…I miss those days…
John Cole
Two other discs I was very happy to get on the Mac were actually soundtracks- the Crow and the Matrix both are pretty damned good soundtracks. I used to play them back to back on long drives- around the four hour mark, especially if I was driving across boring-ass Ohio to visit my girlfriend at the time.
Ned Raggett
Dag, good lord. You’re digging up the memories I thought I had forgotten or never had.
Bombadil
You never struck me as a denizen of the Mothership. You have risen in my estimation, grasshopper.
John Cole
Dag is one of the best bands ever, IMHO, and I am still, to this day, shocked that they did not make it big time.
I highly recommend this band to anyone who likes music.
John Cole
I have also been to over 50 Dead shows. FWIW. Hell, I think I saw close to 20 in 1988 alone. That may or may not have contributed to me failing out of college and joining the Army. You be the judge.
Punchy
Word.
Mixing the insane amounts of deep, grinding bass on that album with my roomate’s (at the time) state of the art Paradigm speakers and a phat reciever/amp combo, and we had a sememster of about a dozen noise complaints. Either that, or the police just really liked White Zombie, and wanted to hear it up close. Suspiciously, 5-O never showed when we cranked up The Geardaddies or Flatt & Scruggs….
Jake
iTunes is fairly frickin’ nifty (works great on my Dell also). I haven’t tried any damaged CDs yet but I’ll stick in a few when I get home.
I would never have bothered with Mac products (they bothered me enough in college) were it not for Pandora’s deal with Apple and now I’m eyeing the iTouch whenever we go to Costco.
Krista
Ah, the Beastie Boys — you know you like an album when you wear out not one, not two, but THREE cassettes of Licensed to Ill.
gypsy howell
John, exactly how is it you became a republican?
jrg
I’ll be – I never knew people outside of Raleigh knew Dag. They were great.
Rustic Overtones (out of Maine, IIRC) was another great band that never made it, but should have.
Jake
Wait. This Dag?
How could such a funky guy have ever fallen under the spell of The Cadillac Cowboy?
John Cole
Yep. Love ’em.
John Cole
Well, for starters, I have what could be considered a conservative temperament (or used to be considered). A quick example-
Several years ago my mother and I were watching the first episode of the new season of Monk, and I said- “HEY! They changed the themesong! I liked the old one better”
My mother quickly stated that she couldn’t even remember the old theme song, to which I replied:
“I can’t remember it either, but I liked it better.”
She still laughs about that. As a side note, I was apparently not the only one who did not like the theme song switch, as there was an episode dedicated to the switch. Sarah Silverman played the deranged fan.
craigie
I bet that’s not true. I bet you just went to one, and the rest are just flashbacks.
Davebo
Itunes sucks. It sucks on a Wintel machine, it sucks on a Mac, and if they ever ported it to Linux it would most likely suck there too.
Just my opinion mind you. But I’ve got roughly 120 Gigabytes of MP3’s (on a USB hard drive) and if I had to use Itunes to organize them all and create play lists I’d probably toss the drive into the lake.
BTW, I love Anapod Ipod Explorer but like a lot of good software it won’t run on a Mac.
One final Ipod recommendation, the BMW Ipod adapter is pretty darned cool. So go out and buy a BMW so you can try it out!
chopper
god, i thought you were talking about dag nasty, and i was all ‘holy crap, john’s pretty cool’.
then you had to go and burst my bubble. thanks, john.
Tsulagi
Bad, expensive weed at the shows. Blamed the hippie growers.
;)
Billy K
I think iTunes is excellent up to a certain point. Granted, it’s getting a bit bloaty, but it’s still well-organized and intuitive for all the things it does.
However, on my old G5 iMac, iTunes became unbearably slow when I hit about 20,000 tracks. I got a new Intel iMac and everything was fine – til I hit about 30,000. Now it’s straining under the weight. Underneath it all, it’s really just a database app, and at some point the amount of metadata outstrips the speed of the drive and processor and it becomes a chore to use. I avoid launching iTunes if at all possible now.
rachel
Why would anyone export iTunes to Linux when we’ve already got beaucoups apps like that GPL’d?
The Other Steve
That is a good thing. My Rotel integrated amp and PSB speakers are now 10 years old, and still sound good. I had to get the Rotel fixed two years ago, one of the power supply diodes fried, and then something else fried when I tried to fix the diode myself. :-)
The Other Steve
That’s what I love about Monk. It doesn’t take itself too seriously.
Chasm
iTunes sucks for ripping if you have a huge and diverse library that you have to, you know, actually keep track of outside of iTunes. Like all things Mac, it works best at what it does, but try and take it beyond what it was designed for, and you’re in headache-land.
iTunes names the files the way it wants to and puts them where it wants to – the way it puts every single song in a compilation disk in it’s own seperate folder by artist dirves me up the friggen wall. I know I’m railing against the converted, but when you get the the point where you’re library is 35K songs, and must be maintianed on several drives so it can be carted to various work-sites, you won’t be singing the praises of it’s ripping capability. It DOES have the easyest library interface, and the search functions are great – but PLEASE Apple, please… let me cutumize the naming and sorting of my own files the way I like it… pretty please?
Encolpius
You can turn this off and organize them yourself if you like. Also, if you define the tracks as part of a compilation, it puts them in a single folder under the disc’s title.
My attempt to put 3000 CD’s into iTunes has slowed to a crawl due to the way iTunes manages large databases. Initially, a CD could be ripped and the tags manually tweaked in ten minutes, but because iTunes insists on updating the database after each track, it can take up to 30 minutes to even rip the CD, nevermind going back to fix the tags.
Fecapult
Both of those bands were great! Dag’s ‘Righteous’ Album blew away their subsequent releases though, IMO.
Cain
Ripping and what not is really good on Linux these days. Most programmers are huge music fans (since they constantly listen to music while programming) and have a fine granularity when it comes to music taste.
People who are writing apps like Amarok (which is pretty good I hear…) can really let you listen to wide range of music you have in your collection.
cain
caleb
http://slickermongoloid.blogspot.com
all links for the blog are current.
I suggest starting here……
slickermongoloid.blogspot.com/2007/03/repost_2972.html
(NSFW) album cover.
MarkT
Windows Media Player can be set to automatically rip a cd when you put it in the drive – that’s not a point in iTunes favor.
The cd drive in our MacBook sux – been replaced once already but still spends a lot of time going “kerchunk kerchunk kerchunk”
iTunes is quicker to start on Vista than Windows Media Player.
Guav
iTunes can also be set to automatically rip a cd when you put it in the drive.
Jon H
“but because iTunes insists on updating the database after each track,”
Odd, I’ve never seen that.
If you’re on a Mac, perhaps you could set up another user account, turn on user switching, and rip the CDs in the other account in the background. Once the MP3s are on the computer, you could import them into your main library, maybe in batches of 10-20 CDs. Then delete the second user’s iTunes library and start ripping again.
This might work on Windows, too.
rachel
A bunch of them even got together and made a free music-oriented live CD distribution. It’s supposed to run like Knoppix.
Or even if you don’t have it in your collection; I’m listening to Internet radio on Amarok right now.