Sometimes I’m not so bright. I don’t always use my toys/tools to their best advantage. Oh, I’m using them, just not to the full extent they should be used.
I’ve had my iPod for going on 3 years. GNC was the first podcast I ever listened to, and I have been around since before episode 200. All this time I’ve owned my iPod, I’ve done nothing more than a download a few audio books, transferred all of my CD’s to the iTunes library, and set up play lists, as well as getting a pretty good collection of regular podcasts I listen to. When it came to iTunes, I never used it for more than just keeping my library and adding or removing podcasts. I figure if my iPod ever bites the dust and I replace it, it’ll be pretty easy to restore everything to a new device.
The other day I walked into a colleague’s office and he had some great jazz music playing. He was fixing my non-updating Dell laptop (apparently the network settings on our domain were not allowing auto updates to non-campus-resident equipment) so I was in there for a while while he got it to update and fixed the settings so it would auto-update in the future. I finally asked him what station he was listening to.
“It’s iTunes.”
You mean music you’ve downloaded?
“No, iTunes radio.”
ITunes has radio? I’ll be durned. He showed me where it was and I stared at that directory, “Radio,” realizing that it had been there all along on my iTunes but I’d never bothered to notice it, much less check it out.
This is music nirvana! There is pretty much every type of music you can imagine, streaming like a radio station, the majority without ads or commercials of any kind. I had no idea it was there, and I’ve been using iTunes for at least 3 years. I’ve spent the better part of the last two days surfing around finding stations I like and memorizing their names so I can find them again. I’ve been unsuccessful in bookmarking them in any way so I can quickly go back to them. I may be missing something, and I’m going to keep playing with it.
Now I’m just going to hope I’m not the only one who never noticed the radio directory on iTunes, or I’m going to feel really dumb.