July 13, 2004
iTunes for Windows
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While do I have a couple of music production irons in the fire right now, and I have a new iBook that I’m enjoying thoroughly, today I’m talking about iTunes for Windows. I’m now ripping my music collection to AAC files using iTunes, and I’m using my Dell Windows XP box to do it.
AAC is like MP3, but it’s a little more recent, and sounds a little better at the default setting. I could go crazy and tweak the AAC encoder, or rip at a high bitrate, but I’m not enough of an audiophile to care. I can hear the difference between the lower bitrates and higher ones, but it’s not important to me for this purpose.
Anyway, when you’re ripping your music with iTunes en masse like I am, you’ll want to make sure you have iTunes setup to “Import Songs and Eject” when you insert a CD (this is found in the General preferences). If you have this set, and “Connect to the Internet as needed” checked, iTunes will take the CD, figure out the track names if it can, import the songs, and eject the CD. You can blast through a bunch of them in a day.
There’s a catch, though. A couple, in my experience.
The first time you insert a CD, Windows prompts you for an action to perform on the disc. One of the actions is “Import songs using iTunes”. Do not use this if you want to do what I’ve outlined. iTunes’s preference cannot override the Windows autoplay (that’s what this is called) setting. When you see this prompt, choose “Take no action”. Windows will ignore the disc, and iTunes can pick it up.
The import and eject business doesn’t work when you’re logged in remotely using XP Pro’s Remote Desktop Connection (this might also be called Terminal Services, but the Mac OS X client is for Remote Desktop Connection). This is my preferred method of dealing with the PC (I don’t have the space to keep a monitor setup and attached all the time, so the PC is usually in a closet), but it doesn’t work for this purpose. The first CD I put in imports and ejects, but nothing works thereafter. Considering everything works fine when I use the machine normally, I assume this is a limitation of the remote desktop software. Any solutions or other ideas, of course, are welcome.