How would you change iTunes?
So we all know that poor old iTunes got about as close to ignored as
is possible amongst the orgiastic frenzy of iLife
updates, with just a minor update to version 4.7.1. Shame, considering iTunes and iPod are more synonymous than
peanut butter and jelly and said iPod is hot, hot, hotter than when you pull said sandwich from the toaster oven. That
fact combined with a tip from Zach
Everson about his iTunes wishlist inspired this post:
What changes would you make to iTunes? What new features would you like to see? Go ahead and get wild on this
question. You want a BrainTunes implant that will stream your library directly to your noggin? Put it down in this
thread.
Here are my iTunes wishes:
- Please, please, can we have folder organization for playlists?! iPhoto got it so please, Santa Steve, can we? can we?
- More on organization: I don’t have a lot of music that fits neatly into a single genre. I want to be able to ‘tag’ tracks with multiple genres a la Flickr and del.icio.us.
- Some folks are pining for album artwork delivered as PDFs via iTMS. That’s fine, but what I really want to see is a whole new multimedia concept behind album art instead of just reformatting old analog liner notes in the digital realm. Instead of looking at the visualizer while an album’s tracks play, how cool would it be to watch slideshows, video, and interactive content? Like Zach, I don’t want a separate PDF file to keep track of; I want it right inside of iTunes, and I want it to be rich media.
- This is cool and makes me want to be able to sync my iPod directly with iTunes via Bluetooth. I hate cables.
- I want an easier way to manage audio files distributed in multiple locations. A bunch live on my laptop, a bunch live on the desktop machine in my home office, and a bunch live on an external Firewire drive. When I’m out and about on the laptop, tracks that are not local show up with an exclamation point next to them - fine. But I want a way to say “show only those tracks which are local” so that I can play a playlist without generating the “file cannot be found” error. Maybe there’s a workaround for this - does anybody know?
What do you want to see in iTunes?
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Reader Comments (Page 1 of 5)
Josef K. said 4:17PM on 6-16-2005
I have been using iTunes since 1.0 & have been asking Apple for over a year to implement most of these improvements. I am a bit discouraged in seeing that many others want some of the same improvements & Apple hasn't really improved iTunes in over a year (& hasn't mentioned any improvements in the Tiger literature).
How many people have actually sent feedback to Apple's iTunes & iPod departments? Here are the links if you haven't done so:
http://www.apple.com/feedback/itunes.html
http://www.apple.com/feedback/ipod.html
Anyway, here's what I have requested over the years:
1. Gapless playback w/ AAC files
2. Library better able to handle storage of music files in multiple formats (i.e. no duplicate listings for songs that were converted from lossless to AAC just to be uploaded to an iPod).
3. A Library category for the different volumes on which Music folders are stored & being able to edit tags for those music files when that disk is not connected to the computer & then having an alert window confirming changes to the tags when you turn the external drive on or check a box not to see such a warning or have new changes to the Library info in a different color & a "View" option to examine them & accept them upon the disk joining the network.
4. Different views for the library as Tabs (like in safari) so I can quickly switch between a view with all songs by an artist & a view with all songs on a particular hard drive without having to type stuff in the search window, or have a View of all tags that had been edited or a View of all files of one type (mp3, aac....). Also, an Artist view option that splits the window showing all albums by that artist (w/ album cover art), similar to the way in the iTunes store, clicking on the cover would then list the tracks. The option to have a different "View" for Classical Music & maybe Soundtracks so that you can have a different category system more amenable to Classical.
5. Contextual Menu Burning/Ripping, so I can have presets automatically load to get CD info & rip a CD into lossless or AAC @ 192 without having to change preferences all the time.
6. A seperate window for editing tags so that you aren't interrupted when ripping tracks/listening to music at the same time & to make it easier to cut & paste info from other songs.
7. Options for autofill (Smarter Autofill) when entering tags: alphabetical, most recent, most frequent, & a choice of those options within a Genre or by dates (i.e. a decade). Maybe a Contextual Menu for a Preference to quickly switch between these options too.
8. A feature which identifies duplicate songs by title & allows you to compare them by examining the file itself (first by song/artist tags, then by comparing the data), prompts you to listen to the files (to confirm) & then substitutes the duplicates with aliases that come up in an album view in the library & which will convert/burn the track if prompted to.
7. Category Additions: Separate date fields for copyright/original issue & CD release (to make it easy to stop my eighties re-issues stop showing up in my 90's/00's playlists, while retaining the CD info). Multiple (user can select #) genre fields to tag B52s "Planet Claire" as "New Wave" & "Dance" & "Love Shack" as "Pop" & "Dance". Using Grouping for this complicates matters, as I use it for "Producer/Mixer" so I can group all songs produced by Martin Hannett or mixed by Flood. Producer & Re/Mixer categories would be nice, though Apple would probably assume that few people would use them, so another suggestion would be to allow 2 user-created fields so that the user can create the category & fill in as s/he pleases. Another category for "Song Version" would be nice too, distinguishing between a Live, album, single, remix etc., without having to make the Song Title unwieldly. "Song Writer" instead of "Composer" for all genres but classical & soundtrack (going back to having different views for different genres, maybe by having a checkbox in the Preferences).
6. Support for other codecs (FLAC, OGG) & true VBR ripping.
7. The ability to import (& create) Song index points for really long tracks, as well as a simple editing tool to cut out dead air in "hidden" tracks (maybe integrated w/ Garageband?).
8. Album info & artwork saved in a separate file nested in the album folder, so you don't need to add the info to every single song file in an album just to have the artwork.
9. Smarter Playlists that can be created using Boolean arguments, i.e. [X + (Y-Z)] + A. "Meta" Playlists making it easier to make Playlists of Playlists. You can simply have a set playlist that plays songs (at random or in order) from different Playlists or Smart Playlists by simply Selecting a number of tracks, which creates a list of that # of drop down menus (w/ all of your Playlists & Smart Playlists as choices), so that you can play random songs from a preset sequence of Playlists.
iPod:
1. Dual Processor &/or larger RAM module (if needed) for gapless playback/less hard drive wear/Party Shuffle on the iPod/ipod dj'ing from a single iPod/previewing recording (see #2).
2. Ability to Record High quality audio (to Apple Lossless or AIFF) or lo quality spoken word (HE-AAC) on the fly & without the use of a cheap 3rd party device that doesn't work.
3. Another user input category (numbers) besides the rating stars (so I can use them as ratings). i.e. 1) song files that need to be re-ripped, 2.) Explicit Lyrics (so I can preview albums for my radio show), 3.) correct id3 tags, 4.) remove space before "secret track"....
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Philip said 4:17PM on 6-16-2005
This issue was addressed to some degree in post 58 and then again in 69:
Browsing through the library or other playlists should not interfere with the currently playing playlist. If I'm listening to a playlist and browsing through my library to find more to add to it, I don't want the playlist to stop because I'm not longer viewing it. Winamp 5 handles this perfectly with a media browser that is separate from the current playlist. You can browse playlists and media by artist, album , genre, etc and if you want that to become your current playlist or become your playlist then you click on it, but it won't interfere with what is currently playing unless you explicitly make it. iTunes assumes that if you aren't viewing your current playlist, then it shouldn't be playing it, but hell I did't press STOP or anything.
Winamp 5 also makes excellent use of crossfade between tracks when using the "SqrSoft Advanced Crossfading" plugin. The only thing it doesn't fade is hitting the play or pause button, if you want to skip forward or back a track, it will crossfade that, if you hit stop or close the program the song will still fade out. The only time I can think that you would want to abruptly stop music is if you hit pause, it's much nicer to have all other transitions more smooth and natural. Note - you can set this to not fade tracks which are short (e.g. you wouldn't want a 5 second long crossfade on a 10 second audio clip)
But my only significant gripe with itunes is that you can't effectively edit playlists live because simply viewing your library will interfere with the playback of the current playlist.
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Dan Wood said 4:14PM on 6-16-2005
Allow album artwork to live alongside audio files, not only embedded in the files. I hate the idea of the artwork taking up valuable space on my 'Pod when it could be used for music instead!
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Scott Morrison said 4:14PM on 6-16-2005
1) Podcast catching
2) For shuffle: option for dialog to select playlist to sync at plugin.
3) Podcast catching
4) Allow multiple chapters for aac files - (I don't know if this is possible) for audio books, podcasts -- so that forward/back button on itunes/ipod will go to next/previous chapter. (imagine when Adam sets up a drum cadence on DSC. Just hit forward to instantly jump to end of cadence)
5) I know -- not itunes but build a podcast creation application (perhaps a branch of Garageband)
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F_D said 8:24AM on 7-20-2005
An improved client-server model for iTunes library sharing. Sharing with folks around the office LAN is fine for peeking at who has what -- discovered some nice new tunes that way. But on the home LAN, I know and love and trust all the PCs and Macs talking to each other. I want the 120 GB hard drive on the desktop upstairs to share over AirPort to the iBook downstairs that's plugged into the sweet stereo. I want the playcount on that library to increment. In other words, when that iBook plays songs shared from the upstairs PC's instance of iTunes, it should be "subscribing" as a client app and incrementing playcounts and updating last-played dates and letting me change ratings etc.
Hey Apple: Your man Steve just told me that shuffle is "IT" -- well, the play list I like best is called "Recently Unplayed" and it's a little tough for "give me all the songs not played in the last 30 days" to work right when the "last played" date isn't incrementing. And no, I am not interested in AirTunes as the solution because I don't want to run up and down stairs every time I want to skip a song.
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Unxmaal said 4:14PM on 6-16-2005
Who gives a crap about podcasting?
I want iTunes to perform automatic ID3 tag updating, a la MP3 Tag & Rename, or some of the other nice apps that are made only for Windows.
I also want it to handle automatic album art updating, but I bet Amazon would get angry about that.
Oh, and the biggie: I want a skipped counter. Increment the skipped counter by 1 when the song is /started/, and subtract 1 from that counter when the song /completes/. Later, make a smart playlist called 'crap that I skipped', and adjust ratings accordingly.
That's about it, other than my pie-in-the-sky dream of having the Music Library be back-ended to a real database, so that I can perform extended SQL queries to make my playlists.
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ysm said 4:14PM on 6-16-2005
a tiny, kinda esoteric one:
Skip album feature. I just kinda rediscovered the "Shuffle by album" setting, and it's great, 'cause if I have a complete album in my Library, I probably prefer hearing it all together and in order. But I skip a lot when shuffling, and chances are if I don't want to hear a randomly-selected song at a given time, I also don't want to hear the band. So if I could option-apple-rightarrow to skip the entire album, well, that'd be cool.
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Zach Everson said 3:02PM on 6-23-2005
Why am I not surprised to see so many responses? Great call with some things I missed - like hierarchial folders. Just thought of another one too - being able to omit tracks from smart playlists that look at the number of times a track's been played. I'm learning Spanish via my iPod and many of the lessons have infilitrated playlists (yeah, I'm not doing that well).
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inziga said 4:14PM on 6-16-2005
How about a "checkmark all" and "uncheckmark all" feature for when browsing for songs to burn to cd?
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jbelkin said 4:14PM on 6-16-2005
I want a return to SOUNDJAM where you could keep separate playlists as separate files ... when you have nearly 175 GB of tracks as I do, the library file cannot really handle that many songs nor I want them all in my library - like turning off auto syncing - for advanced users, we can figure out where that playlist is ... and now that I'm about to buy a couple of IPOD SHUFFLES, that way I can keep that playlist entorely separate ... plus - anytime you have more than 10 playlists - you start to lose organization.
And while I may use this feature, I know others would want this definitely - how about a "hidden" playlist in the ipod (regular screen ones) so we can hide our BAY CITY ROLLERS & STYX tracks and people will think we only listen to THIEVERY CORPORATION and NICK CAVE :-)
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Otterbob said 4:14PM on 6-16-2005
I would like to be able to link iTunes songs to a stored lyric file, and display the song lyrics in the iTunes visualizer. I was hoping that xLyric development stopped in June because of some deal with Apple, but perhaps not.
I also would like to see an iTunes-like interface for mp4 movies.
I am a DJ, so Karaoke is one of my areas.
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Jesse Wilson said 4:14PM on 6-16-2005
Similar to your multiple genre for songs, I'd like to see better handling of multiple artists (ala Windows Media Player).
CDDB (or other) lookup for songs not ripped within iTunes would be nice.
I'd also like to see all (within reason) tags editable from the song list (as opposed to going into each via Get Info.
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Scott-O-Rama said 4:14PM on 6-16-2005
TIVO INTEGRATION!!!!
I would love to be able to play my iTunes playlists and AAC file through the Tivo Home Media Option.
I also like the idea for album art, lyrics, etc being integrated right into the music file.
Lastly, smarter playlist creation ala Moodlogic.
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pb said 4:14PM on 6-16-2005
+ better iPod synching; it doesn't seem like tracks are deleted off of the iPod if you uncheck them in a play list
+ i like the "crap list" displayed above
+ iFilms Rental Store
+ Apple *must* address the attractiveness of the subscription model; $180/year for *all* the music you want is a tremendous bargain; I would listen to *so* much more music and try out *so* much more obscure material
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Kobin said 4:14PM on 6-16-2005
- Better handeling of album art, e.g., display album art for the song that's playing; as it is now, you have to select the track to see the artwork. How about an album art view -- I'm sure Apple could come up with something.
- Auto-update of ID3 tags and album art, like in WMP (it doesn't have to use Amazon.com).
- Add 'tags' or 'lables' to songs, like in Adobe Photoshop Album -- just select some tracks, drag them to the lable, or vice versa.
- Some way to differentiate complete albums from single tracks.
- 'Watched' folders (i.e., tracks put in these folders automatically appear in iTunes)
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andrew said 4:14PM on 6-16-2005
better handling for multiple drives and dvd/external archives. having some hundred gigs of music is not convenient with my 80g powerbook.
for example if i want to play something that is not currently on the local drive, iTunes could ask for the specific media (e.g. instert dvd no15 for this album..) instead of ! marking the track.
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Laurie said 4:14PM on 6-16-2005
Barb - try netTunes ( http://www.shirtpocket.com/netTunes/netTunesDescription.html ) to solve your last wish list item. It works over TCP/IP too.
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Scott said 4:14PM on 6-16-2005
originally Posted Jan 13, 2005, 12:14 AM ET by Zach Everson
" Just thought of another one too - being able to omit tracks from smart playlists that look at the number of times a track's been played. I'm learning Spanish via my iPod and many of the lessons have infilitrated playlists."
This is currently possible in iTunes! Just edit the smart playlist info parameters (CMD-i).
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John Hood said 4:14PM on 6-16-2005
iTunes 5 was a noticeable absentee from Macworld and took a little of the lustre off things! Plus I was hoping that AAC+ would debut on iTMS too!
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mattie said 4:14PM on 6-16-2005
Themes! I went back to the Audion site the other day, and those themes are so cool. I'm sick of that Exel-like iTunes interface.
Delete / hide all unmouted or non-localizable tracks.
Video playback. It's in iTunes already, so why can't I have a music video library I can use in iTunes?
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