Ernie the Attorney points to a neat little program called the iTunes Catalog that lets iTunes users (Mac only) create a professional-looking catalog (including album cover art) of all your iTunes music in HTML of PDF formats (What's in your iTunes music catalogue?). You can check out a sample catalog taken from Ernie's collection here (Ernest's Library). I think this very cool (though I don't have an iPod).
However, a few questions/points:
First, why do you have to pay ($10) for this software? The HTML catalogs can easily be linked into the iTunes store, thus providing lots of free advertisement for iTunes and their licensed artists. I rather expect Apple and its now numerous rivals to provide this functionality in upcoming releases for free. Heck, I would imagine that they would host the catalogs free-of-charge.
Second, where is the easy ability to publish playlists and the associated software that will let me automatically download all the music to go along with someone's playlist that I trust? I have eclectic tastes in music, but generally I don't want to indiscriminately mix genres (discriminately mixing genres for a playlist is something else). Playlist functionality would be a useful addition to all these online systems.
Third, people always talk about the social benefits of Original Napster-like collection browsing. Doesn't software like this provide almost the same social benefits (and in some ways, more), while being fully legitimate?
The software is made by KavaSoft, not Apple. That's why you have to pay $10. The guy who developed it needs a return on his investment.
Posted by Ernie on November 7, 2003 07:35 PM | Permalink to Comment