iTunes Epiphany

I bought an iMac in the spring of 2005 when Apple's stock was about $24 a share and have been loving it every since (minus the lack of RAM). But, if you're anything like me you are suspicious of all these software updates alerts you're hounded with every few weeks. Me being the stubborn technology user I am, refused to update iTunes for about 3 years. Recently, I discovered that every time I tried to burn a cd, iTunes would just conk-out on me as soon as I would hit the burn button. After iTunes quit on me unexpectedly about 5 times in a row, I figured out this must be a part of the scam to get me to update to iTunes 8.1 (this is a feeble recreation of the mental muttering I was doing at the time).

So being the Encino man that I can be sometimes, I decided to just leave iTunes alone for about a month and see if that would solve the problem. Nope no luck tonight I tried to burn the The Game's newish album LAX for mom dukes (don't ask or laugh it ain't funny) and the same thing happened again. Finally, out smarted by Steve Job's hoard silicon mongers I was compelled to download 8.1, wack!!! Now the first thing I see is some side bar about Genius or something using pretty pictures trying to coax me to load it so it can start communicating with iTunes store and DJ for me. If this Genius is anything like the dweebs at the Mac store I definitely will leave that feature disabled permanently. Is it just me or is the elementary appeal of Mac getting annoying?

Another change I was pissed about is seeing my beloved radioactive burn button missing from the top right hand corner of the iTunes window. Why!!!! So anyway I got over that pretty quickly and tried burning a cd... put cd-r in and wait... no cd icon below the library icon... WTF... So I go to Google and ask it how to burn a cd on iTunes 8.1, and I get these bootleg tech web page discussions about uninstalling iTunes then reinstalling it, so much for collective-everyone-contributes-wisdom (more on that soon). I decide to consult iTunes help and it tells me to look for a burn disc button at the bottom right, huh? Nothing is there buddy...err, Genius. Finally, I figure out this techno Rubic's Cube. If you want to burn a cd you can not take songs directly from the library, you have to drag the songs into a new play list and then once inside that play list the burn disc button appears at the bottom right. Its a lazy looking rectangle button, damn programmers need to spend 15 minutes off of World of Warcraft and at least try to make the burn button look cool... GOD!