so I just downloaded itunes, something i’ve never bothered with before because a) I never buy downloaded music and b) i don’t have an ipod. even when i reinstalled quicktime, i installed the previous version, as the newest comes packages with itunes, and i just despise that kind of marketing – i shouldn’t have to download something i don’t want. but recently someone turned me on to a few cool podcasts, and realplayer doesn’t support podcasts, so i thought i’d give it a whirl.

well i’m here to tell you it sucks. after installing it, I decided to try out some of the m3u playlists i put up on my website. it’s anarchy. first of all, itunes randomly inserts songs from the playlist just any old place in the library. so if perhaps you had (oh, just for example) a bob dylan playlist, you will suddenly find “all along the watchtower” interpersed between gorillaz and the arcade fire, whilst “rolling stone” is underneath modest mouse, for no apparent reason. completely defeats the purpose of a playlist.

secondly, some song links wouldn’t play at all. upon investigation, i found that these were all links with spaces in them. turns out, that even if the original link is url encoded, itunes de-encodes it so that it can no longer follow the download. e.g. if the original link from the playlist for “the aeroplanes – don’t stop me” is http://www.kingsofar.com/mp3s/Dont%20Stop%20Me.mp3, itunes reads it as http://www.kingsofar.com/mp3s/Dont Stop Me.mp3, and can’t download it. when you rightclick “get info” on the clip, go into “edit url” and replace all the spaces with “%20″, suddenly, like magic it works. grrr.

then, even if your m3u playlist has no spaces (not always possible, considering the links are generally done by someone else), itunes will play the first song, then stall. that’s just crazymaking. so you either have to download the playlist to your desktop first, then drag it into the source sidebar (this is, by far the best option, as it eliminates the problems above), or install a third party application like m3u2itunes to get it to work properly. bloody hell.

there’s more techie complaints here, but suffice to say, i am not impressed.

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