Ay Dee's muzik
 

Um, I guess this goes here.

I have an iPod (60GB Video), so of course I have iTunes. I left this morning and everything was normal (though I DID disconnect my iPod without ejecting it in iTunes first, maybe that's what caused this, I don't know). I get home to check and see if ESPN released any more PTI podcasts. I look to the left panel of iTunes and I see "Ay Dee's musik". I'm thinking, "what the fuck is this?!" In iTunes there's 11 gigs of music that is NOT on my hard drives. I would think it was some sort of Apple promotion, but there are entire CDs, not just singles by random artists, and the ID3 tags are atrocious.

I'm sure there's a simple explanation, but I didn't even touch the music store. Where the hell did this come from?

If you're on a network, it could be iTunes picking up someone's shared music.

Well I am at college, so maybe that's it... It would be awesome if this guy's taste in music didn't suck. Can I pick up multiple networked selections like this?

Which playlist selection is the music showing up under? If it's your main library then the music is on your hard drive. If it's under Shared Music then it's on someone else's computer. In the latter case, you can listen to it through iTunes, but you can't download it (with iTunes).

If there's only one Shared playlist you can see, it should look like the Music Store icon, only Blue. If there are many people with Shared music, it should be under an unfoldable icon labeled "Shared Music."

It sounds like it's a shared library. iTunes will automatically find other people's iTunes shared libraries which are within the same IP subnet as you and allow you to stream music from them. Don't worry, that music isn't on your computer.

It was gone for a while and now it's back, yes it's in blue, so I guess it's someone around here with godawful music taste.

Is there a way to know if he can see my stuff, and is there a chat option involved with this?

Yes. Go to iTunes' preferences and check the sharing tab. If the box for "Share my music" is checked, he can see yours.

No, there's no built-in chat. Often at college people will put their AIM name in parens in the Shared Name (near the bottom of that preferences window) if they want.