Late to the Party, again

As none of you will recall, what got me started on MySpace was replacing my faithful old CD player with an iPod. That let me get out the door without my 48-disk carrier, encouraged me to replace many fine albums lost in bad breakups (bastards, spit), and got me immersed in new music. I am now catching up on the punk and heavier stuff that I missed during my country and western period. (Not Country-and-Western.) Expensive, but all good.

I am not supposed to install music on my system at work, and I have been a good little bee about that. A bit of stuff accumulates here anyway. When I download music I buy at Amazon during the day (at lunch time, of course. Why are you looking at me that way?), that ends up on the hard drive and I don't delete it right away. I also had somehow gotten the Windows Media Player ripping whatever CDs I played here and didn't realize that until I ran out of space on the hard drive. When you don't have a page file, that gets your attention pronto. And not in a good way.

With no music on the hard drive to play (once I got all those WMAs cleared out), I have never wasted space on iTunes. The routine was update Quicktime, curse because of the time wasted installing iTunes with it, uninstall iTunes. This week, they dropped a new PC on my desk and so I had to go through that drill again. This system has a bigger hard drive, so I decided to let iTunes ride. I thought it might be an opportunity to subscribe to some podcasts.

Well, damn, I have been missing a very cool thing. This is the first time I have run iTunes on a network that wasn't just my home system. Why didn't someone tell me about the whole shared library thing? This is so squealworthily cool. I can listen to music in other people's iTunes libraries! Free! Wheeeee! And what a great way to check out some different stuff I wouldn't find on my own! This! deserves! many! exclamation! points!

I just listened to Curtis's copy of a Godsmack album I have somehow missed and I predict many fine hours enjoying Curtis's musical choices. Tony and K are living in the 70s, but that is not all bad. You can do worse than Aerosmith and Beethoven. Chicken Billy has a lot of prog rock and the complete Cypress Hill. Jen is slave to iTunes and doesn't have anything that isn't wearing a DRM chastity belt, but Brian is completely unlocked and has the Franz Ferdinand I have been meaning to check out. And am I the only person in the world who doesn't have Alanis Morisette? Or who does have hot jazz?

I feel bound to reciprocate, of course. I am going to have to install TouchCopy here and copy some interesting non-DRM stuff over from Ratatask so that Curtis, Tony, K, Jen, Chicken Billy, Brian, and all the others can check out my stuff. That is going to be fun, too.

And free! I pay for my music (with a couple of exceptions I think I will write about soon), so this is a $expletively expensive hobby. Free music is my friend.

Off to explore Nick and Jim.