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iTunes Tops Out At 32,000 Songs
usr122122121 writes "A Macintouch User has discovered that iTunes maxes out at 32,000 songs." I did test this myself (a one-liner perl script to give each file a unique artist/album/title), and it's apparently true. How much it matters is an exercise left to the reader.
Some of the things I do with the 12,000 songs I have ripped from my own cds:
Play nothing but instrumental stuff like Tangerine Dream while playing roleplaying games. Play all speed metal while doing boring coding tasks. Play random gothic progressive while doing creative coding design. Play all ska when I feel like having something energetic, or blues when I want to practice guitar. Etc. Different music for different situations.
Why am I not a "legitimate music user"?
I will grant that I'm not a typical music user; I don't spend anything at all on movies, going out, etc, and a large part of the collection was acquired when I had no car payments and a series of good contracting jobs.
I'll also grant that to someone who can be satisfied with a week's worth of music, much of mine may strike you as in bad taste, as much of it is not very mainstream, but what this has to do with honor is a bit unclear.
I have a 'smart playlist' called "unheard faves" that selects 75 tracks with a rating of 3 or more, and a play count of 3 or less. I set it to random and repeat and let it play while working. This way I almost simulate what it is like to have the radio on at work, but without ads or annoying DJs. When the playlist starts to shrink I kno wit's time to rate some more music.
I do wish the 'smart playlists' would allow better use of boolean operators. How can you ask for all songs rated 3+ but not ambient music or trance? iTunes needs a mood switch.
I'd like to write a small script that pretends to be an MP3 file, but actually just reads out the current time, the weather and some news headlines. Then I'd get it to play on the hour... Kind of like "It's 10am and you are listening to dave's unheard faves. It's -6 outside and snowing. In the news headlines the USA has declared war on Germany - citing their support for international terrorism, and that they started the last two world wars." Ideally this would said using the voice of "Princess" :-)
I used to have a better sig than this, but I got tired of it
As an avid music buyer and music journalist, I think I have approximately 2000 cds, many of which are in my computer. Having also ripped lots of vinyls to mp3 I think we could assume that would amount to a grand total of 3000 cds. As my musical tastes are very varied, with metal opuses of 15 minutes and more on some records, and punk, psychobilly and other styles with traditionally short songs, we can for convenience count with 8 songs per cd (if some of them are singles/maxis). 3000 x 8 = 24000. That, plus all the free music I've downloaded from the 'net amounts to very close to iTunes magic limit.
And I haven't even counted my "illicitly" acquired music, which I would personally call "reference tunes" which I use when writing reviews, but you might call it piracy or freedom or whatever. I don't really care. What matters is that for me, a limit on 32000 songs is definitely A Bad Thing, and one which might actually affect whether my next non-laptop computer is going to be an Apple or not.
For all the "real" music pirates out there, I guess it's even more of a problem. 32000 songs is "just" about 320GB.
However, I do realize that I am one of rather few people who has any semi-legitimate needs for this amount of music, and I don't feel like dropping nukes over Cupertino for it. Knowing Apple - they'll probably fix it in the next major update of iTunes, and with their current strategy, make us pay for it.