The music's on us

Taking advantage of the storage capacity provided by the 120 GB hard drive I recently added to my computer, I converted all my CDs into the popular MP3 format, thereby turning my computer into some kind of gigantic jukebox or something like that. (Yes, it's still legal to do this, no thanks to the RIAA. However, I cannot condone hacking into my computer to get all these MP3s, so I'll have to completely ignore any such attempts.)

Anyway, the final tally is 24.85 GB for 7140 "songs," which would take 15.3 days to listen to all the way through. (15 days, 8 hours, 47 minutes, 36 seconds, to be exact.) Songs is in quotes because some of the so-called "songs" are actually old commercial jingles, or radio station jingles. I have strange musical tastes.

Apple celebrated this accomplishment by releasing a new version of iTunes today, which allows one to rate all the songs in his or her library on a scale of 1 to 5 stars. Also, it allows one to set up playlists using logic like "all songs with a rating greater than 3 stars and a year between 1965 and 1969." This means it's to my advantage to spend those 15.3 days rating all these songs, not to mention entering a year for the majority of songs, which don't have them already.

For a future version, I'd like iTunes to create a database of the lyrics of every song, so that playlist logic can include things like "all songs naming a breed of dog," which would include such hits as Elvis Presley's "Hound Dog" and the Everly Brothers' "Bird Dog." I'm suggesting this with tongue only partially in cheek, since I really think something like this is going to be possible in the not-too-distant future.