Wednesday, December 12, 2007

Thought of the Day: iHate iTunes

All I wanted to do was download Kate Bush's "Running Up That Hill". I wasn't looking to save 99 cents and download it for free from some scary Nigerian virus site. No, I was willing to be bilked a buck to get the song quick, so that I could listen to it while I worked out.

I started my downloading quest at 9:30 PM. I plugged my iPod Nano into my computer, and went to the iStore. I found the song, and clicked the "Buy It" key, but iTunes informed me that the iTunes version I upgraded to two weeks ago was so old that the song wouldn't download. Annoying, but nonetheless, I still wanted the song, so I went to the Apple site to download this week's version of iTunes, which was only supposed to take 6 minutes. Apparently 6 iTunes minutes are like 6 moon minutes (you know with the whole time/space thing where minutes on the moon are double what they are here).

I downloaded the new version, restarted the computer, and the whole system went wacky. After a phone call to my husband accusing him and his brother of screwing up the computer, which he denied, but those two + computer = very bad things, I looked forward to downloading the song. I re-set the computer, went through the iTunes update download again, and clicked on my desktop's iTunes shortcut, but it wouldn't open, so I clicked the "Help" key. Apparently this week's iTunes update requires you to delete QuickTime, and re-install it as a stand alone program. I did all this, because now I wasn't fucking going to bed until I had this song!

I finally gave up at 11:30 PM. The closest I got to actually having the song was streaming the original circa 1980s Kate Bush video on a YouTube site set up by some weird French guy. I know that downloading music is supposed to be the wave of the future, and I may sound like an old fart, but I'll take a good mix CD any day. At least if I had a CD, I would have been able to do my workout, while listening to sweet Kate make a deal with G-d.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

You know, Graham got a Zune as a work gift yesterday, and while he was trying to get it set up, iTunes wouldn't leave him alone. It's like it's programmed to keep opening if it detects you trying to install a competitor's software..it was very strange. Over and over, he'd close it and it'd spontaneously open itself again.

Once the Zune's installed, though, I'm all over that thing. It comes with a radio in it and the music purchases you make for it aren't DRM'd. I think the library's smaller, but whatever. I can deal with that if everything else is better than Apple's product.

FOUR DINNERS said...

Gimme your mail addy and I'll mail it to you.

Limewire is pretty good for downloading most anything.