I had to highlight-Delete Key to get rid of the track.
A long string of annoyances let me to lose it there. The whole saga goes like this:
I was browsing on the
Internet Archive, checking out some 24/96 audio files. People familiar with the Archive will know that the audio files are typically in open-source formats: mp3, Shorten (a lossless compressed codec) or FLAC (an open source, uncompressed lossless format).
The particular file I wanted to listen to was in FLAC 24-bit, and just happened to be 96Khz sampling rate (you could choose many sampling rates for files in 24-bit FLAC).
For me, iTunes is for music I listen to. It is not a video repository; it's not my pdf library (although it works well as one); it's not the only audio tool I have or use, and it's not some kind of music file junkyard.
iTunes also has it's own hard drive, with nothing but music files on it. Since moving to a MacBook, that drive is a portable (removable) drive that I use with both the laptop and the desktop, as required.
Also, I don't use mp3's or m4p's for music listening so I have them set so QuickTime launches when one is encountered.
So, if and when an mp3 file somehow shows up on the computer, probably through some net download of some kind, what I want is for absolutely nothing at all to happen. What sometimes happens, is some helpful application launches the mp3 file, despite the fact that I hate it when applications do stuff on their own, which might interrupt something I'm doing.
Now, if that helpful application ignores my QuickTime file association, and launches iTunes instead, that
really pisses me off because iTunes, in it's wisdom, is going to move a copy to the Music Folder and add the file to the music library.
People who understand the processes involved are probably nodding their heads here, going, Oh, so THAT's why he was pissed off. Because, if the removable drive isn't mounted, iTunes has a panic attack that involves a bunch of things that I really hate to have to deal with.
It creates a new iTunes Music Library folder in my home directory, with that single mp3 file in it. It adds that mp3 file to the library. If someone should click on any song in the library, iTunes can't find the file and wants me to manually locate it (because the drive it's on isn't mounted). Which I hate doing, because there is no easy way to do it except poke around in the Finder clicking and Option-clicking and double-clicking your life away.
So, when I download this FLAC 24 file, and go to convert it to mp3 so I can listen to it and see what the hell it is (the Internet Archive's Hi-Rez audio list leaves much to be desired information-wise) with the Open-Source application MAX (iTunes can't read FLAC), well, I don't like it when MAX launches iTunes before it's even finished converting to mp3. I wouldn't like it if it launched QuickTime either, but at least in that case it would be the application it's supposed to launch according to my System-wide settings.
Since I had 7.1.1 downloaded but hadn't launched it yet, I was greeted with the license dialog. Perfect; I'll decline the license and iTunes will have to quit, having done nothing at all.
This causes MAX to hang. Force Quit MAX. Always a nice thing to have to do on a Sunday. Open the mp3 in QuickTime, and it's not encoded properly (just a bunch of digital noise).
Okay, moving to Plan B, I have Amadeus II, which can read FLAC files, so I launch it and listen to the uncompressed track. It's a 20 second introduction to a live set. That's it. Don't you just love it when a file that is not worth the trouble to deal with in the first place causes you more grief than 44 runaway puppies in a shoe store?
So, I dig up the hard drive, connect it to the MacBook, and launch iTunes, since we have a new version on our hands, we may as well give it what it wants.
No playlists. Greaaaat. So, I have to create a smart playlist, with recently added as the criteria, to find out if that damn mp3 crawled into iTunes and died (because I don't know exactly what MAX named it). And so it did. Name starts with 00 (two zeros). Yeah, I would have guessed that first thing, I thought to myself. (Never noticed it before, but you can actually
yell at yourself. The human brain is a wonderful thing).
So, I go to delete it, and the delete menu item is grayed out. I actually missed it the first time, thinking it was gone altogether, which is really helping my mood right along to it's natural, relentless, seemingly inevitable, unstable conclusion.
So I go to iTunes help, and it tells me to highlight the item and hit the Delete key. Which is how you have to delete things from the Keychain (no delete command anywhere), after going to Apple and reading a Support Document that tells you this.
Which led to my rant which said, more or less, Apple you are driving me crazy and why the hell did you get rid of the Delete function? Which they didn't do, but hey, it's hard to see through all that red.
I now realize the Delete function was grayed out because I was looking at the playlist, not the Library. So, apologies to Apple for the rant.
But, the stuff I said about the x86 annoyances I really meant. I miss a cursor that, spinning beach ball or no, still moved a bit, telling me it was just busy thinking, instead of freezing solid for eons. I also miss being able to type stuff and have the computer remember it, and once it came around to listening to you again, would dutifully place all the text in the box or window you were working on.
Both of those things are things that PPC, with it's handling of instructions in parallel and out-of-order did well; and x86, with it's long pipeline of data that absolutely must be handled in order, or it has to start over filling the data pipeline from scratch, does poorly.
That last one is a hard habit to break; I'm used to typing Google searches before the window even loads, and with a PPC Mac, it just fills in every character you've typed once it does load. With the x86 Mac, instead of "Apple Driving Me Crazy" you get "ing Me Crazy".
Which is ing me crazy.
Hmm, all my delete functions in iTunes 7.1.1, like Doug's, work just fine too. 
Linear Mode
