rogue

Importing from Limewire and that U2 album: Apple is officially ending iTunes, and there's so many weird times we'll miss.

 

Cast your mind back to the early 2000s.

We were mourning the loss of Napster, the OG of illegal music downloads, and just getting used to our new friend, Limewire. We’d run home from school, ask our mum if she could get off the phone so we could use our dial up internet to log into MSN messenger, where we’d proceed to log in and log out multiple times to make sure our crush really knew we were online and down to send winks to each other (which in hindsight, sounds… inappropriate).

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Then Apple released iTunes, a media player that changed the game. Suddenly, we could buy music legitimately without leaving our homes and/or organise our illegally downloaded Limewire files into playlists and upload them to our chunky yet totally cool and necessary iPods.

More than 18 years after iTunes launched, Apple has announced the end of the application. Which impacts precisely no one, because everyone moved onto streaming services like Spotify years ago, but it was nice of them to let us know.

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Can confirm we do not remember any of these after 2012. Image: Twitter.
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Because nostalgia makes us feel warm and fuzzy on this cold winter day, we've cast our minds back to remember all the things we used to do on iTunes.

Remember when it was connected to MSN?

So when we were logging ourselves in and out to get that guy's attention, he could also see that we were really into the new Metro Station song or had Nelly Furtado on repeat.

So handy.

Reformatting the title of songs.

This was extremely time consuming, but also absolutely necessary because everything you illegally downloaded from Limewire had a wack file name like 50_cent_in_da_club(dirty).mp3.

Downloading the album art off Google.

Because, again, we'd spend the evening downloading songs off Limewire then go to bed and pray it would all be done by the time we woke up. When it did, (a true miracle), we'd then spend approximately 12 years finding the correct album art on Google, saving it and uploading it to iTunes.

Changing the genre name.

Why was the aforementioned 50 Cent song's genre listed as Anime? We didn't know, but it simply would not do.

Buying our first legal song from the iTunes store.

A big deal. A bigger deal to our parents, whose credit card we were using.

Finding new music with iTunes' free content.

Once a week iTunes would have a free song and video available, and because our parents had forbid us from using their credit card again, this was the best way to get legit content from iTunes.

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Bopping to the iTunes and iPod ads.

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BANGER. Image: YouTube.

Silhouettes dancing to good jams with white headphones? Iconic.

Importing 'real' CDs.

Because we needed all our music in one handy place, of course.

(But oh god, the fury of importing a CD only to discover none of its info had imported with it! To Google for album covers we go!)

That U2 album.

Never has the world come together to hate something as much as we did when Apple automatically put U2's Songs of Innocence album in all of our iTunes libraries.

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Waiting forever for our iPod to sync.

Can you believe we used to listen to music on these?!

I mean, we were using dial-up internet, but why did it take so long???

RIP iTunes. It seems fitting to end with a lyric from our #1 played song from 2007: Thanks for the memories, even though they weren't so great.

What are your iTunes memories? Let us know in a comment below.