This Friday I received my mac mini. And since I’m migrating all of my day to day computer use to the mini I figure id share some of my thoughts on it.

System Specs:
2.26GHz Intel Core 2 Duo
4GB memory
320GB hard drive
NVIDIA GeForce 9400M graphics
8x double-layer SuperDrive

Moving my files was painless from the apple interface just hit “option k” and that opens your browser menu. type SMB://ipaddress and once authenticated you can see all of your windows shares. I always migrate files manually, as every automated thing I have ever used misses something. This also assumes that you know how to create proper windows shares.

The first thing I noticed after moving all of my files over was that its insanely quiet. I have spend the better part of 5 years and thousand’s of dollars trying to build a PC this quiet and once I turned my PC off I was blown away by the basically silent operation of this little thing.

I dropped my music library into itunes, keeping all of my ratings playlists, and settings. This is a process I may write a how to about as I haven’t found one that actually keeps everything. I installed Lightroom as although I love the apple iPhoto application its hard to work with multiple files in other editors using iPhoto. Basically transfering everything was painless, I use dropbox for most of my documents so they stay synced across all of my computers without any interaction from me.

I’m using the built in mail app as its really slick and uncluttered, Gmail works great with it if you follow the instructions on setting it up from google’s site. Its such a nice change of interface from outlook, outlook is huge, and cluttered compared to mail and mail supports threaded viewing. I just love my threads.

Ill have to post a update after using it for a couple weeks. But my general impression is that its actually powerful enough for me to use without any noticeable lag in the interface. I’m switching from a quad core with 8GB of ram and nvidia Geforce GTX 280. And it feels fine, nothing slow or laggy. I have to run some tests on video encoding/re encoding and this may be where the sheer brute force of my overkill pc may come out ahead. But overall I’m so happy that my office is quite, and uncluttered.

Last month, we curled up with a pair of headphones and a 1.0 release candidate of Songbird, an open-source media player based on Mozilla technology. As a cross-platform music player built with Mozilla’s trademark extensibility in mind, Songbird soared with its integration of services like concert ticket notifiers, lyric downloading, and artist bios. Today the official Songbird 1.0 is shipping, and it even supports DRM-protected iTunes Store files, so we took another look at the feature roadmap and how the final version shaped up.

First look: can Songbird 1.0 replace iTunes, WMP?.

So I have been using itunes for a little while now and I feel like i got a pretty good handle on managing my music through itunes. I know that a lot of people do not feel the same way at all around here. I was wondering why you think itunes sucks? And what your using instead? I know that there are a lot of alternatives out there songbird, play, foobar, winamp.

I just prefer iTunes because in my opinion it has the best podcast support, the best store hands down, and its the easiest way to organize your music, download album art, and create playlists. I also share it between multiple profiles, my girlfriend and I share a common library so we can share playcounts, purchases, and we just like to share in general. I understand my needs are special, and thats why I choose the right tool for the job.

Let me know what you guys use and what you think of itunes in general. Its the big guy on the block now so id like to hear your thoughts.