Wednesday - September 10, 2008

focus pocus

iTunes serving up guaranteed eargasms

Just when I was sinking back into a nice little Katamari Damacy habit... what a pleasant way to waste those little chunks of time between the shoulds and have to's.

With DH having had so much free time the past year, the iTunes library had become a very unmanageable  gianormous monster.  Trying to make a nice playlist was like trying to spell out your name if one can of alphabet soup was dumped in an olympic sized swimming pool.

ITunes to the rescue!

Damn if it hadn't already eaten up the larger portion of my droopy eyed evenings, often keeping me sitting before the screen long after I should have laid this body down.  Surfing the tunes... tunes for fun, tunes for work, other people's playlists, music videos you never see on tv anymore, podcasts.  

If you plug in "pickles" you get 149 hits... you can gobble up 30 second bytes of songs like "Zebras, Pickles and Airplanes" and "Dill Pickles Rag", artists like "Seven Foot Dilly and His Dill Pickles", and albums like "Pickles for Porcupines" by One Party Rule.

Like that wasn't enough of a vacuum to suck in a music lover like me.  But NOW... ohhhh....

The latest iTunes update isn't just a stroke of genius, it actually contains a real, live (not as in breathing/sleeping/pooping, but as in functioning/entertaining/inspiring) "GENIUS".  The "genius" enables  you to focus in on whatever style of music suits your current mood and expand your listening options at the same time.

Highlight any song in your music library (which means nearly 15 thousand choices if you're dipping into our monster belly) and Genius will make a song list of whatever length you specify of similar songs that you have buried in there, many that you forgot you even owned. It's not just a good idea - it works amazingly well!  I'm in aural paradise!

But wait!  That's not all!  (Hey, they are in business to sell songs...)

Pull up the sidebar, and you'll get ideas on related tunes you might like based on your current choice.  Shopping for music couldn't get any easier.  Unless it was free.

Was there anything else new in this iTunes update?  I don't know.  I'll check that out right after I, um, let's see... there it is!  The We Love Katamari music... let's see what comes up when I highlight one of those songs... like maybe that lovely tune that plays when you roll up the flowers... ohh, mmm.