2007 — 12 May: how much longer, Mr iMac?
You've been loading my MP3s into your iTunes database for well over ten hours now. Some of us have to sleep, you know! I realise the NAS isn't a full speed link, but I fail to see why you need to copy the MP3s onto the iMac from the NAS. Can't you just point to their location, dammit? Still, I suppose there's a mildly grim compensation in knowing that the 28,000 "songs" you reckon to have processed so far represents over 82 days of listening. But why are you duplicating so many of the entries, I wonder? Silly software!
Update: No matter how perverse software may appear to be, you can always rely on (this) user to make things worse. (This) user really should know by now that, even if he doesn't bother to RTFM, he should at least cast more than a cursory glance at the various options nested within the iTunes' tabs.1 The music library is now down to a much more reasonable 20,755 "songs"2 with nary a duplicate. (That's what doesn't happen when you think you're pointing only at the [blameless] network drive but you have a checkbox ticked that says — in essence — "search every folder you can find for music" and you're already sharing your HP XP machine disk with your iMac over the local network.)
Of course, at the end of this process it remains to be seen if I can point iTunes safely at the NAS drive once again, and reduce the load on the XP box. At the moment, the music folder there exactly matches the NAS drive, but that's taking no account of all that delicious Fats Waller music acquired yesterday afternoon but not yet extracted. I thought it best to rebuild the MP3 database on the iMac from scratch with the NAS offline as the thought of editing thousands of duplicates by hand was by no means a happy one.
Users! Who needs 'em?
Update 2: all is now audio browsing bliss. The MP3s are being sucked off the NAS and served to the Roku player downstairs "simply" by leaving iTunes running on the iMac.
Black Book
This is a superb and gripping film, based on real events during the German occupation of Holland during the latter days of World War II (which, to remind my younger reader, means 1944 and later). See it if you can. Mind you, it's not a barrel of laughs. We both watched all the extra features, too, which is almost the first time we've done so together. It covers a lot of stuff that I don't recall got much of a mention in the UK education system, at least. According to Christa, the German education system was somewhat more comprehensive.