An Ipod Disaster Averted

Last year, my wife and I bought a new Mac Mini. We love it-- it fits nicely, with a 17-inch flat screen monitor on the desk my great-grandfather made 70 years or so ago. We got all the bells and whistles, so we can do just about anything with it-- including burning DVD's.

My step-daughter has become quite the little auteur, creating videos for her favorite songs. Being a nearly-ten-year-old, her music taste is pretty much what you'd expect of an almost-ten-year-old, heavy on Kidzbop, Jesse McCartney and Hillary Duff.

My wife wisely created four "desktops" for the four people using the computer in our house, which we thought would avoid any problems. We avoided most-- but not all.

We ran into all kinds of problems with songs that my step-daughter had legally downloaded from itunes, including having the songs show up mysteriously in my dvd projects. We found out that this is a known problem with itunes, but not until after many hours of aggravation on my part. I began to really, really hate a couple of tunes that would show up repeatedly.

My wife has searched the net and found the solution to the problem. I did, however, almost have one more tragic run-in with the reviled songs.

My step-daughter was trying to make a cd of her favorite songs, and could not get the cd to run on her cd player. In trying to figure out the problem, I ripped the songs from the cd onto my imac's itunes as a playlist. I figured I could just delete the playlist when I was done.

A couple of days later, I discovered that a song from another previous playlist was still on my itunes (I use my imac to load my Ipod), and it dawned on me that deleting a playlist still left the songs in the library. To my horror, I discovered that the Hillary Duff, Kidzbop and the other songs were still there, lurking on in my library, waiting to torture me on a drive home after a hard day at work. I thanked god for whoever thought up the "Recently Added" function in itunes-- otherwise I might have missed one of them when I deleted them.

Okay-- I do cop to leaving "Chim-Chim Cher-ee"-- the original Julie Andrews/Dick Van Dyke version-- in my library.



And there is hope for future salvation from Kidzbop and Hillary: this morning, my step-daughter was practicing "Werewolves of London" for her guitar class.