The Sequel

Max Payne 2 freakin’ rocks! I can’t believe it. Right from the very beginning we have a great plotline going, and the same little things that made the original game fun are still there. It’s even more like a movie than ever, and the music is haunting. It ties in closely with the first game and even brings you back to a few locations. I’ve only had time to play for a little bit, but it’s worth it.

I love my iPod, and I love my mp3s, so you can imagine how excited I was when I heard that iTunes for the PC was coming out. I installed it and was almost immediately disappointed. Here’s why:

• iTunes, like the iPod, uses a flat library to store your songs. It uses ID3 tags to catalog your songs into albums, genres, and artists. However, in the library itself, there’s no subfolder support. That maks it difficult to find songs unless ALL of your songs have correct tag information.
• It’s resorce-heavy. iTunes takes up a lot more space in memory than it should considering it’s supposed to be a media player. THe problem, of course, is that it’s trying to be a cd-ripper, mp3 organizer, and cd-burning software as well as a media player, and all of those things take up memory.
• Deleting a playlist from your iPod does not give you the option to delete the SONGS from the playlist
• Running iTunes with an iPod connected automatically replaced my nicely ordered list of playlists with an alphabetized list of my playlists WITHOUT PROMPTING ME.
• It’s just like MusicMatch. Look at the features list and tell me it’s any different… I dare you. Music Store doesn’t count, sorry.
• Music you buy comes to you in AAC files that you can’t convert to mp3 files without first burning them to a CD and re-ripping them. The music store also only has popular stuff. Nothing that I looked for was available.

It’s not all bad. It’s a great sounding music player, it rips CDs into AAC or MP3, and it hooks into the Music Store. If you’re a casual music listener or you rip your own music collection, you may really like this program. If you have a lot of songs like me, stick with Windows Explorer, EphPOD, and Tag&Rename.