How to crash your computer with iTunes

I've had my iPod for a week now, and yesterday I went into iTunes again to update my podcasts, check on my music, and see if I could find a couple more things to pull in for my iPod. Since I had only used up about half of the 8 GB capacity, I figured this would be no big deal.

I subscribed to two more podcasts, Movies You Should See and NPR's Wait, Wait, Don't Tell Me. Then, I went ahead and told iTunes to "GET" a bunch of other episodes of some of the other podcasts I had subscribed to. This should fill up my iPod nicely, I reasoned, and I let the computer chug away at downloading and went to bed.

Well, sometime the next day, my wife yells at me from the living room, "What did you do to the computer?!" Turns out I had totally filled up our little 4-year old PC to its digital gills with data, and it had something like 140K left on the hard drive. Oops.

Well, being the technological brains in the family, she sits down and fixes the whole thing, moves stuff around, and generally gives me a mini-tutorial about how to use iTunes (and not make duplicates of all my podcasts and not accidentally delete all my music - two things I recently did).

So, since we're not quite ready to commit to a whole new computer yet (I think a beefy iMac is going to be the '08 family Christmas present), we're headed off to CostCo on Monday afternoon to get a big external media drive. The plan is to transfer all of our music and everything iTunes is pointing at over to our new drive (500 GB for $129 says the website). That should hold all the video, movies, music, podcasts and whatever we want. And plenty of room to grow (hopefully).

Joining the iPod club

Hooha! I got an iPod for my birthday! I was hinting, but it was still a surprise. It's a green 3rd generation 8 Gig iPod Nano. The third gen nanos have video, too!

I've already gotten into iTunes and pulled in all my ripped CDs. I also subscribed to a bunch of podcasts (some favorites that I was simply pulling off YouTube, some I had downloaded directly from their host websites).

My sister got me an iTunes gift card, too, so I was able to buy some songs I found out about from Pandora (there's only one MC Chris song on iTunes!! Lame!) I also pulled in two Mitch Hedberg Comedy Central tv specials. I've yet to get my own videos on there - that's something I'd like to do, and I'll updates here as I figure that out.

But, overall, I'm totally digging my iPod. I'm finding iTunes and syncing up my iPod to be an easier process then I thought it would be, and I have no complaints about the click-wheel or using the iPod interface (two things I've heard other people complain about). I am definitely seeing how one could get lured into the "listen to my iPod everywhere all the time" thing - it's awesome having so much music so easily available in such high quality in such a small package. I can't believe I actually worked out in the garden last summer with a Sony DiscMan clipped onto my belt...

I love Pandora.com!

My wife turned me on to this great online radio station / music website, Pandora.com . You tell it what music you like, and it then picks songs for you, playing them back to back without interruption. You help it learn what music you like by giving songs a thumbs up or thumbs down (or nothing to be neutral). I've been using it for a few weeks and it's fairly refined, almost always playing music that I really like (across multiple genres even!).

It'll play bouncy fun music like They Might Be Giants, then go to some nice J-pop, then to something like Primus or Soul Coughing or even Prodigy... but always something good! The feedback system is simple and fun and you can query it to find out "why" it is playing certain songs.

iTunes download

Long time since my last post, I know. But that's a good thing, I think - there's less for me to "find out," right?

Anyway, the wife got an iPod shuffle from her mom, so we got the ol' iTunes on the home computer. I tried iTunes on my work machine and it wouldn't install properly - either a work firewall thing or my pc here just sucks, I dunno. Anyway, at home, we got it downloaded okay and had to go through a nice two days purge / conversion of music that we had on there. In the end, we both played around with it enough to create some playlists, some "special" playlists, get music to her iPod and even burn a stack of CDs. I'm going to see if I can subscribe to a podcast or two to figure out the whole subscription and RSS thing, too.