Regular K

The great thing about growing up in a family with three brothers is that gift buying is incredibly easy. I ask them what they want and they tell me. They ask me what I want and I tell them. We go out and buy whatever was asked for and give the gifts to each other. All of us have our perfect gifts (since we chose them ourselves) and no feelings are hurt. We usually just give them to each other once we buy them, since we don’t really see the point in wrapping something when we already know what will be inside the wrapping paper.

This year, Justin got me an iTunes Music Store gift certificate, since I’m somewhat of an anti-piracy advocate. I was happy when I heard that Apple was opening the iTunes Music Store to Canada, since it’s we were lacking a good source of legal music downloads here. Prior to this gift certificate, I hadn’t actually played around with iTunes too much and actually felt that it was a bit bloated for a music player. But now, I’ve been spending more time playing with it and I’ve found that almost all of the functions it provides are useful, with little that I wouldn’t use.

I really like how it provides an excellent, integrated music experience. It handles CD ripping and burning very elegantly, as well as music downloads in one simple interface. It would take a very long essay in order to explain how much I love iTunes now, so I’ll spare you my fanaticism. However, I can’t stress how great it is to be able to legally download music now. In the past, I’ve wasted a lot of money buying CDs where I only liked two or three songs, so it will be nice to just pay for what I want from now on.