Of course, you’re now probably wondering why it was illegal at 11:06 pm. Let’s just say it wasn’t the time of day that made it illegal. It’s 8:40 am right now, give or take, but it applies. Since I have somewhere to be at 10 am, I’ll have to perform some acts of magic to make it legal for me to go outside which I was too lazy to perform before.

The more annoying hoops are if you want to listen to your music on an MP3 player and you’re not willing to shell out for an iPod. To get the music onto a non-Apple MP3 player, you first have to burn a CD. You may not want to listen to the music anywhere other than your MP3 player, but you have to burn a CD first.

Once you’ve burned the CD, you then proceed to rip it and save the song(s) to the MP3 or WMA format (depending on your device). Then and only then can you transfer the music onto the possibly-not-an-iPod device of your choice. Not only the extra time and extra hassle, but if you don’t have a rewritable CD handy, you’ve now burned a CD-R that you didn’t necessarily want.

What I’m curious about myself is why it’s illegal in St. Louis to go out to your own car at 12:06 AM. There are definitely some strange laws on the books in various towns, but I’ve never before heard of anyone being at risk of being arrested for that. (My understanding is that in most of the country, it’s perfectly legal go out to your car at any time of day you chose.)

I don’t download too many songs from the ITunes store. I mostly use ITunes just to store my music collection that I have ripped from CDs. But I have purchased songs in the past. Most recently in January when I got an ITunes gift card.

Anyway, just to make sure my recollection was correct, I just took a blank CD, inserted it into my computer, ITunes opened up, I created a playlist, Used some songs purchased from ITunes, some not. i moved the songs I wanted on the CD to the playlist. And I clicked on “Burn disc”. Now, I don’t consider that a lot of hoops. It took a few minutes since I didn’t randomly select songs. I tried to create a CD I would enjoy playing a few times. So I picked out some fun songs that would go well together. The actual burning of the cd was pretty quick.

Now, I haven’t tried it in my car, for if I went outside to my car right now, I’d probably be arrested. But I did try it out in my CD Alarm Clock, and within seconds, I was hearing Weird Al singing Canadian Idiot. Which is a good thing, since Canadian Idiot was the first song on the CD. If he was singing anything else, I would have known that ITunes had somehow screwed up, Weird Al was inside my alarm clock messing with my mind, or I had officially gone crazy.

Of course, I own a Mac.