My latest reason for loving iTunes:

I was on my laptop in the Grad Room and I had borrowed someone's Black Sabbath CDs. (A Ronnie James Dio era disc that is fun to listen to but would never admit to it in public normally.)

However the Faculty tech support people continue to insist I have wireless access while I continue to not have wireless access, so I wasn't able to rip the tracks and have the track names downloaded for me. I didn't want to pass up the chance of having these highly non-sought-after songs on my computer, though, so I ripped the CD anyway, and now had a set of AAC files (like mp3 for cool people) named "track 01" to "track 11", and by this point I had even forgotten the name of the album, so it would ordinarily be a rather arduous task to reconstruct the song titles and track numbers by searching for lyric snippets on Google and track listings on Amazon. Especially considering my conscious insistence that I only possessed the songs for irony value. (this is a rather flimsy lie, of course, but if I can't convince myself then my ability to effortlessly convince other people to do things might come into question.)

But thankfully some software designer at Apple actually has a bit of a feel for what users might actually want to do. So when I highlighted the nameless songs, and went to the Advanced menu and chose 'Get CD Track Information' it happily went out and did a CDDB query on the tracks exactly as if they were on a CD I had just placed in the drive.

So why does it take a hardware company to make such good software? Also, I definitely think it's time cock rock made a comeback.