I've used iTunes ever since it was available on the Windows platform. The latest version is light years better than the original. But two nagging problems still exist with playlists and user data like ratings. And since playlists are probably the most time intensive activity and source of personal angst, it's not a good thing when they disappear. And on the Windows side, playlists have a bad habit of getting messed up way to often.

This latest little saga with playlists started innocently enough, a friend bought his son a new iMac. In the last few years Apple has brought out some great lower end units (well under $2000). This has been one of the reasons they have increased their market share. The iMac that my friend bought is a good example of this new breed of Apple computer. It has a nice 20-inch screen, is self contained, and very straightforward in setting up.

As far as speed goes, it's as good as any of the medium level PCs and much better than most. It appears to be about the speed of my new little MSI Netbook which is uncluttered and has the maximum ram. I really like my Netbook since it's so small and quick in basic email and surfing. Anyway, the iMac is a good choice for a home computer and has all the bells and whistles you could want like web cam, beautiful screen, speakers, wireless network card, microphone, and lots of popular applications.

So the setup was quick and easy, there was only one little glitch with the wireless router that was probably my fault and not the iMac's. In fact the iMac setup seemed much quicker than a PC, not sure why. So we looked at what we wanted to transfer from the original PC to the new iMac. Office documents of all types just whizzed right over with no problems. We found similar software for many of the common tasks and got them all setup and working. I keep double clicking and got lost in the menus sometimes but all in all it was easy and quick.

OK, now for the iTunes music. Being the crudgemudgen I am, I made two back ups of the iTunes on the PC. One with the iTunes menus and one manual way. This was 60 gigs of music that came from a million different places and would be a nightmare to replace, if possible at all. The one thing I noticed right away is how iTunes on the iMac was much quicker in almost every function.

So the first thing I tried was simply copying the music files over from the PC to the iMac. OK, all the music showed up so I imported the library. It was taking a long time to get album and song info but that was normal. The problem was no playlists. None, nada, the files were incorporated into the system and but were not useable on the iMac.

OK, lets go find the files that contain the playlists and see what's keeping them from showing up. This is an XML file that contains all the reference points to the file locations. Oops, it's holding the PC method of directory structure, which is different on the iMac (PCs file paths use letter designations, iMac doesn't). OK, let's get the favorite text editor and see if we can replace the drive letter with the straight path information that the iMac needs to navigate. I was aware that the directory structure and file naming methods could be an issue but figured iTunes would fix it on the import. Wrong.

This took a few minutes since the playlists file was huge. I double-checked the file paths and made sure all drive letters were gone. OK, import the library again and bingo; we had playlists and other data that we were missing before. There were a few that got chewed up somehow but easy enough to fix through the program. I did notice that some information still didn't make it like the play count. But I never understood what purpose that served anyway unless you were being charged for some rental music.

iTunes on the PC is lethargic and very slow once you get a lot of music. Not so on the iMac. This could be the developer's fault when creating iTunes for Windows but it is noticeable. And even though I told this story in a few minutes, trust me when I say this involved a few hours since the library was big and it took awhile to backup and import each time.

I was going to replace one of my older units with a new PC with Windows 7 but now I just might get an iMac. I was impressed with the one I just setup and the reduced risk in malware and viruses is a very good thing. And I really liked iTunes a lot better on the iMac too.