iTunes performance on my PC has just been dragging lately. Seriously. Whether it’s adding files, syncing stuff up, or just fixing title case, I feel like I can have iTunes open or everything else.

“This is probably because my library’s so big,” I concluded. I’ve been reading up on splitting libraries, moving libraries to USB drives, storing your library on Amazon’s file servers, and a bunch of other plans and schemes, but no real guidelines on how big is too big. (Then again, if they sell an 80GB iPod, they have to expect that people will have libraries that big, and not because they’ve bought Pirates of the Caribbean 120 times.)

Further research inspired an uncomfortable realization: Smart Playlists might maybe wreak havoc on system performance. And why shouldn’t they? If you have a Recently Played or Most Frequently Played playlist, then those are updated every time a song is played. If you have a Top Rated playlist, it’s updated every time a song is rated. And if you have a “Brit’s Greatest Hits” playlist, with Artist Name = “Britney Spears” and My Rating greater than three stars, then every renamed file checks with that playlist to see if the new metadata qualifies it for inclusion.

(Implementation note: I think you could update playlists only on viewing, or on iPod syncs, but playlist sharing and other implementation trivia might get in the way of that. I don’t know how this is stored, much less how it’s optimized, so I could be talking out of my butt on this specific point.)

I may or may not have a larger library than the average iTunes user (it looks like there are certainly power users well beyond my 100GB), but I would be willing to bet I’m in the top 1% of Smart Playlist junkies. I have created SPs for:

• Artist discographies
• Year-end Best ofs
• BPM filtering (yeah, right, for all the DJing I do)
• Diagnostics (songs with obviously bad years, no album title, etc.)
• Favorites lists
• Genre-based mood lists
• Artist “groups”, to keep musical families or record labels together
• Odd queries (which four-star songs haven’t I heard in three months? what have I imported but not listened to yet? what have I heard a million times but not rated?)
• Year-based reminiscing (rock albums from 1992 to 1995)
• Filetype filtering, because sometimes other programs really want MP3s and not anything else

My love for this feature probably borders on abuse, and the stark fact is that I have a lot of very large smart playlists that I only very rarely use, or could recreate almost immediately if it came to that. I had no idea I was suffocating it with my love. A lot of these are playlists that could be converted, after they query the database once, to regular playlists, and I wouldn’t miss much.

So that theory makes sense. Unfortunately, I can’t find a really thorough discussion of the problem beyond 2005ish, and iTunes has gone through many updates and enhancements since then. Someone described smart playlists as tiny little applications themselves. iTunes operates at an acceptable level with 100 smart playlists of varying sizes and complexities, but if you’re starting to become performance-oriented, they might be dragging your system down.

Regardless, I wiped most of the dynamic playlists from my iTunes (converting some to regular playlists), and it seems like it’s a little peppier today. Again, it is completely possible that there’s a release note with iTunes 5 or 6 or 7 that says “fixed the problems with smart playlists - create as many as you want now”, but it seems reasonable to think that smart playlists might be best used in moderation.

(I made an exception for the three gigantic playlists that fill my iPod: 20GB of recently added files, 20GB of top rated files, and 20GB of frequently played files. I absolutely cannot put my iPod into manual file-draggy mode. Never.)

I can’t tell you how disappointing it is to read in Wikipedia’s article about what Podsafe means that podcasters are still slavishly following Adam Curry’s lead.

Adam Curry’s effective status as the advocate, role model, and protector of all podcasters led numerous other podcasters to bend the rules in the same ways, using the same arguments.

Despite this, he regularly commented on DSC that, if it is really important for a show not to break any rules, a podcaster should not do the same thing. (To this end, Curry had also advocated the development and use of what is now known as podsafe music, and his production company PodShow created a new site called the Podsafe Music Network.)

Finally, after ages of debate on the subject with industry professionals and members of European parliament, as well as multiple complaints from Dutch music services about violations, Curry decided he’d hit a dead end and that any negotiation in progress with music licensors was futile. This was the reason he gave on 2005 November 7 for committing his show to henceforth being entirely podsafe.

The implications of this move, including the future exclusion of staple segments such as Hit Test, Backtracks, and the regular mashuptown.com tracks, reached further than his own show. Immediately, or soon afterward, all shows on PodShow began to use only podsafe music, if they didn’t already, and a large number of other podcasters followed suit, either in fear that they could no longer get away with what Adam couldn’t, or in simple support of Adam’s decision and of podsafe music.

Umm, are you serious? Adam Curry is the protector of all podcasters? (Wait, are we sure he didn’t write this himself? Nevermind.) It’s just miserable (if this is in fact the case) that two years into the culture, everything having been written up by NYT and adopted by Apple and appropriated by corporation, this is still the public face of podcasting. Yuck.

I was telling Thad yesterday that Project Rockstar, a game where you manage the music careers of bands you create and staff, has me thinking about working creatively, perhaps in music or podcasting, again. But podcasting for me was fun because I threw licensing caution to the wind, something that I knew was semi-sort-of-wrong, as much as I understood it, or wanted to. So research on podsafe music leads to an article which declares Adam Curry as my default legal and moral guide, and then to a company which recommends and licenses podsafe music: a company run by Adam Fucking Curry. There’s no getting away from this guy.

The thing about all this is that, in the year and a half since I played around with the medium, BMI and ASCAP have both put together dirt-cheap licenses ($300 minimum, with a very small percentage of revenue most podcasts will never generate) that podcasters can use to play anything from the almost-infinite playlists that those two groups represent. The best podcast ever, Coverville, has deals with both, and I imagine that the $300+2.5% or whatever isn’t keeping that guy up at night.

What if my podcast only played the thirty-second snippets from the iTunes Music Store? Would that be legal? Would that be interesting to listen to?

Okay, the game is to critique five random tracks from the iPod, with the specific instruction not to skip anything that’s uncool. Here we go:

• Ludacris - “Hip Hop Quotables” - I gave this three stars at some point, just because the title suggests that he’s trying to be as funny as possible in a short space. I am not hearing a single line that made this track jump out at me, but Ludacris does make references to croquet and Hyundai, so that’s basically what you need to know about that.
• India and Tito Puente - “What a Difference a Day Makes” - probably the only jazz album I know. I first heard this song in 1999 on the bus on the jazz and traffic information station. The first verse is in Spanish, and the whole thing is disorienting, stimulating, and over-the-top. I didn’t ask if it was okay to put on the CDs that played at our wedding reception: I just put it there. I still have my wedding-music playlist on my iPod, and I still play it occasionally.
• They Might Be Giants - “(She Was A) Hotel Detective” - I still can’t imagine what John F. was going for when he wrote this song. I’ve been hating it now for 14 years. I was shocked to see the video as a teenager, since I definitely recognized having seen it years before, but remembered nothing about the song or the band. The sequel is definitely better: in my top twenty of TMBG all-time.
• Jay-Z and Linkin Park - “Points of Authority / 99 Problems / One Step Closer” - I really like the fact that Jay lets Mike handle the first verse here, since it includes lines like “I don’t know what you take us (me) as, or understand the intelligence that Jay-Z has”, but my favorite is “if you grew up with holes in your zapatoes, you’d be celebrating the minute that you had some dough“. Two other things: the redo of this collaboration at the Grammys (swapping in “Yesterday”, featuring Sir Paul McCartney, for One Step Closer) was pretty hard to watch. Jay-Z yapping “yeah” and “that’s right” over actual Paul McCartney actually singing “Yesterday” made an uncomfortable moment into an unintentionally funny one, so I suppose I can thank him for that.
• Mike Doughty - “Unsingable Name (live 2004)” - Is it just me, or did the overproduction of Haughty Melodic strip a lot of the charm from Mike Doughty? His stuff is naturally weird, and the new album seemed pretty square. He’s a very human and vulnerable writer, and too much production makes him sound extremely well-practiced, almost invincible. Either way, this is one of the better tracks on the album, and it’s great (better?) live.

Album art on the iPod is awesome.  I believe I’ve mentioned this.  I have one tiny complaint, though: clicking the middle button on a non-color iPod presents the following options.

• Not clicked yet: regular time countdown (scroll wheel controls volume)
• Clicked once: time countdown replaced by diamond-time countdown (scroll wheel controls where you are in the song)
• Clicked twice: ratings (scroll wheel controls star ratings)
• Clicked again: back to regular time countdown

Now that you’ve got album art, it looks like this:

• No click: regular (volume scroll)
• One click: time scroll
• Two clicks: album art (if there is any), or rating (scroll for ratings)
• Three clicks: back to the beginning, or, if there’s album art, ratings.
• Fourth click: back to the start for album art tracks, but back into time scroll for all other tracks…

My issue is that I rate songs a LOT.  If I want to get to the stars menu, I have to know whether or not there’s album art, and whether to click three or four times.  It seems to me that they could have put art after ratings, or put a "no art available" image in there, so at least the interface is the same for album art tracks and non-art tracks.  Another thought: the scroll wheel does nothing when album art is zoomed in, so perhaps if I click three times (hoping to get ratings, but instead hitting art) and start scrolling, it could gracefully bump me ahead one screen and let me scroll my star ratings.

In terms of other design enhancements, I could take or leave the new anti-aliased font (the other one was pretty crisp, and while I get the point of the fuzzy font, it wasn’t necessary), the click-wheel sound isn’t improved (but I like getting it in the headphones), and the increased tension on the hold switch is greatly appreciated.  (I’d never used a hold switch in my life before the iPod.  It’s an absolute necessity.)  The yanked-cord-pause feature seems to work about half the time, but I use a lot of different headphone sets, and I’ve heard that makes a difference.  The new battery is of course a marvel, since my old iPod was down to about 4 hours and 1 minute of useful life (and I will fill out the form for the free replacement as soon as I get around to it).

My only other complaint is universal to all iPods: why must their flawless exterior scratch within 24 hours?  I scored a free gas card from work and stuffed it in my iPod pocket… you wouldn’t think that would ding it up, but man. 

We all got new iPods!  Yeah!

In short, the nano, at $199, could not be denied my sweet wife.  We’d looked at the minis a few times, and I’d always had questions about sharing my iTunes installation with her, syncing two iPods simultaneously… I just wasn’t enthused about it.  If it didn’t work, and we weren’t happy, then you’ve got an iPod sitting around doing nothing, and I wasn’t going to do that.

But with Christie going back to school, I figured we should probably set up a computer for her so she doesn’t have to share with the 50,000 people that are taking my money on PokerStars.  As soon as that machine was up and running, I dashed off to the Apple store to grab a nano for her.

So while I was doing that, I thought I’d grab a new 60GB for me.  I’d been meaning to ship my three-year old 3G (40GB) off for a battery replacement, and now it’s definitely getting spiffed up for eBaying. 

We’re both tickled.  The album art on the 4G is fantastic.  (That the identical feature exists on the nano is still mind-blowing.)  Christie’s computer isn’t 100% up yet, but I had it up long enough to import four or five albums, and sync it.

I got an email last night from Noah, the KQRS web guy saying that they’d added a daily podcast to the existing KQ Morning Show streaming page.  Good news for fans of that program, which I am, or at least was recently.

The delivered MP3 appears to be about 80 minutes long, and so they’ve dropped it to the lowest decipherable bitrate.  (I chose decipherable over acceptable because the quality is certainly distracting: I couldn’t listen to it for very long.)  I think there might be some VBR business going on, since my iPod isn’t fast-forwarding or rewinding very accurately (and even pause seems to jump you somewhere else in the file). 

So maybe it’s 2 hours, and iTunes just reports it incorrectly.  Either way, it’s significantly condensed: without Tom Petty and commercials, you pretty much get news, chatter, interviews, and bits, which are the best parts of the show anyway.  Everyone probably is sick of hearing it by now, but everyone with Firefox + AdBlock, an iPod and a TiVo is going through exactly what I’m going through: a heightened awareness for ads wherever they are.  This kind of delivery for this kind of show is something of a surprise (because the ads pay for the show, right?  Or the show is there to get people to listen the rest of the day?), but I’m glad they’re giving it a shot.

And for the uninitiated: the KQ folks are rude and mean and fairly one-note in their tone and commentary.  They are, though, definitively Minnesotan, and according to most reports, they have a larger share of their market than any other morning radio program in any other market.  I grew up listening to them, and so did pretty much everyone else my age from here. 

So welcome to the podcast world, KQ!

Huh.  I got an iTrip on Saturday, plugged it into my iPod, threw the whole thing into the dock, and POW: my new PC rebooted, and when it came up, Windows was complaining about drive integrity.  iTunes wouldn’t recognize it after that, and it claimed to have no music on it any more.  I was ready to blame Cratchit’s shoddy PC building, but it turns out a few other people have had that problem.  With minis, not grown-up iPods, and only, y’know, two, but I wonder if there’s not something about PCs and the power going through the firewire jack.  iTrip is supposed to be kind of a power hog. 

I resynced everything and am happy again. Plus, in all the fuss, I set all of the BIOS stuff back to defaults, and the computer is running a lot more happily.  I played Half-Life 2 until my eyes got dry and I needed to check some sort of walk-through, and not until it locked up or rebooted on me.  I like that.