(Now Playing: Bi Kyo Ran, “Ran Part II”, Go-Un–I love my collection)

Funnily enough, I’m not even that into iTunes. I think it’s a swell jukebox player, but I haven’t gotten sufficiently involved that I’ve actually bought anything from the music store or an iPod. Nonetheless, as the Mac Person of Note for several of my friends/colleagues/relatives/countrymen/lent ears, I’ve been getting a lot of feedback about it.

Some of it even positive.

One that surprised me recently was my brother, who specially called up to say that after years of having his wishes ignored by the powers that be, apparently Apple had been listening to his rants to his office colleagues about what he’d like to see in an MP3 jukebox. One feature that I thought was nice in iTunes but didn’t know wasn’t more widely available is an auto-leveling function, with per-track manual adjustment. If you set it, iTunes attempts to ensure that none of your tracks are particularly louder or softer than others. This is good if you’re listening in a noisy or office environment, or want to have it as background music. It’s good that there’s a per-track manual adjustment, as a couple of tracks just need to be a bit quieter, to my ears.

So at least one Windows (and, to be fair, Linux and Sun) user is a convert. Now I just need to show him OS X 10.3 (Panther) and see how he takes to that. Don’t hold your breath, people, Mac hardware still requires some investment for the good stuff.