Now I’m a Mac lover, but there are some things about iTunes and iPods that drive me nuts.
- When you’re listening to your ipod and a crappy song comes on, there is no option to trash it.
- If you import a CD when your computer is offline, it gives the tracks generic names (“track 1, track 2” etc), and then they stay like that. This isn’t very helpful. What it should do is watch out for when you are next online, and then get the real song names off Gracenote in the background, without requiring any intervention from you.
- Podcasts are listed under Albums. A podcast is not an album.
- iTunes doesn’t do anything intelligent with tags. It doesn’t parse tags for similarities (e.g. “BobDylan” and “Bob Dylan” are obviously the same artist), and it doesn’t try to improve them with any social webby magic either.
- It copes badly with compilation CDs. You end up with hundreds of artists listed (e.g. itunes puts a song by “Javis Cocker & Thom Yorke” in its own artist category, rather than listing it twice: under “Jarvis Cocker” and under “Thom Yorke”). And if you have one 4 minute song by an artist, it lists it as an album when you browse by album on your iPod.
- iTunes expects you to make your own playlists. I hate making playlists, but I want something better than “random-everything” or the crappy smartplaylists that come preloaded when you install iTunes.
- iTunes thinks it owns your bandwidth. When it starts downloading two big podcasts simultaneously (which it often does), your web browsing experience slows right down. It should throttle itself!
- iTunes thinks it owns all the audio on your computer, and always tries to put things into your music library. So if you double click a music file, iTunes will load itself and automatically move that file into your music library. I hate that.
I know there are work-arounds for many of the things I’ve listed here, but that’s my point – that they are work-arounds. You have to think, tinker, learn, try out alternatives, and become a mini-expert. Some of us don’t want to!
I agree with your assessment. I am really saddened that iTunes and iPod have no point-of-interaction options, like deleting or un-syncing the song/album that is currently being played on your iPod. When a shitty song on my iPod comes on, I don’t want to have to think “Okay, when I get home, remember to find this shitty song on my itunes and delete it”. Or, when a great song comes on (randomly) it would be nice to a “play the entire album that this song is on” option that doesn’t require manually scrolling through the list and finding it.
A few of my other iTunes peeves:
+ iTunes won’t consider a song “played” until it hits the very end of the song. So skipping over a song during shuffled playback means it can come up again.
+ iTunes does no active management of the music on your drive. Delete a folder of music (manually) and iTunes has no clue about it, continues to show the songs as being available, and won’t remove them even if you go to play them.
+ It wants to play your music back alphabetically. Getting a playlist that actually plays your music randomly, without repeating songs until most of your stuff has been played, is a nightmare.
I strongly agree with you on a couple of points:
1. I was very disappointed that iTunes does not update songs loaded offline once online. I loaded songs offline assuming it would update. I was very surprised that it didn’t. It caused me some extra work. A few weeks later I talked with someone who encountered that same problem but didn’t realize the reason. I would think this would be an easy modification.
2. Compilations drive me crazy. Unfortunately, I have quite of few loaded on my ipod. When searching and playing by artist, what do you do? I know the workaround is to search and play by album, but what a pain!
Harry. Number your points! Then I wouldn’t have to quote them to reply. It’s called ‘usability for text’ ;-)
Gracenote – has their data improved any the last few years? I remember it being awful, especially for soundtracks and classical. Yay to Musicbrainz.
iTunes doesn’t do anything intelligent with tags.
It’s a non-trivial problem though. There are quite a few bands with similar names so some fuzzy rules would get it wrong. I agree that all the trivial cases (and+&, punctuation, white space, ‘The’ present or absent should be dealt with automatically though.
It copes badly with compilation CDs. You end up with hundreds of artists listed (e.g. itunes puts a song by “Javis Cocker & Thom Yorke†in its own artist category.
The id3 format used for mp3 metadata was a real back-of-an-envelope job and we’re paying the price. I’ve heard it called ‘worst specification ever’ – obviously though this was from someone who doesn’t design websites for a living.
Check out the list of genres on the official id3 site. It’s hilarious.
And if you have one 4 minute song by an artist, it lists it as an album when you browse by album on your iPod
Pet peeve. A simple threshold of ‘don’t count an album if it has more than 3 tracks missing’ would clobber this.
Doesn’t metadata suck? Really. Unless it’s 100% managed end to end it’s another chore in our lives. Maybe some people have music collections with perfect tags but I’ve got about 10,000 mp3’s to reclassify :(
iTunes expects you to make your own playlists.
Check out MusicIP. Automagic playlists based on acoustic analysis. It’s spookily good sometimes and interestingly wrong other times.
iTunes thinks it owns your bandwidth.
Almost every app that downloads exhibits this problem. It’s only a few nice peer to peer apps that allow throttling back of the bandwidth usage.
iTunes thinks it owns all the audio on your computer, and always tries to put things into your music library.
It’s a simple preferences but I agree. Apple might have chosen the wrong default here and defaults matter a lot.
Few other suggestions :)
1. Crappy ID3 tag management. This issue is widely covered on Hydrogenaudio.
2. “Forgetful” database.
If I manually delete or move file, iTunes has no clue about it and I’ll have to point the file manually. At the same time most usually store music in a few folders, so rescanning them and/or refreshing information on added files (have they been lost?) might help. Probably the worst “feature” of iTunes. Finding out that file is the same is no problem: binary stream comparison (skip tags) and fingerprinting are all well known techniques. This way we may easily manage our collection, even if it’s re-ripped to AAC instead of MP3.
3. Playlists.
Once again agree. MusicIP offers a wonderful mechanism of creating compilations “by mood” which is far superior to semi-intelligent “make it random”, “select the best” etc playlists. MusicIP is incredibly buggy and has a terrible UI though.
Creating smart playlist and smart per-genre (e.g. merge Goa Trance with Trance) sorting is a long topic but implementation of similar functionality is still possible with today’s technology.
A few problems there!
I have a couple of work-arounds if it helps:
– For a crappy song, make sure you apply a rating of 1 to any new song. When it comes on your iPod, you can click through to the rating and give it 0. Next time you think of it, delete everything with 0.
– Compilations: I’ve no problem with this, things that are marked compilation do not show up under artists, they’re under compilations. For misceleanous tracks, I put them in a compilation album called after the genre, e.g. pop.
– If you delete something from your hard drive (presumably because you aren’t using iTunes to organise your music?) How would it know?
I will add one to podcasts though: podcasts you download manually and those you are subscribed to seem to follow different rules. Things you download and mark as podcast (genre & album) aren’t considered podcasts. I can’t work out what the rules are.
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When i listen to songs that ARE NOT in my itunes folder….they stay visable after i close down itunes and open it back up?!! All i want to show up are my songs. So those songs that i checked out and didn’t like (deleted them)…they show up in itunes…and only a portion of them will have that “!” symbol, which is suppose to let me know that that song has moved or been deleted. Many of the songs that were deleted don’t even have that “!” icon. So i have to actually click on the song for it to tell me it no longer exists or has been moved. What a pain in the ass. I don’t understand itunes at all. Winamp and pc software always use to automatically recognize and display my mp3s correctly based on filename. Anyways..if someone could please email me and inform me on how to NOT have songs that aren’t in my folder to stay visible in itunes. When i check out a song…i can understand if it shows up in recently played …but can’t understand why it stays there even after the program has been shut down and reopened. Thanks derek_kimball@hotmail.com
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OK, this is an arcane complaint, but here it goes. So I speak Spanish and English. Depending on where I am (Mexico or USA), I set the language preference to either Spanish or English. Well, if I rip a classical album while the language is set to Spanish, it gets filed under the genre Clásica, but when I rip the same album with the language set to English, it gets filed under the genre Classical. And the same thing happens to compilations. The get dumped into a folder either called compilations or recopilaciones. This seems very weird, especially the genre bit.
And I share the frustration with the podcasts that get categorized as music. It’d be nice if you could just drag the offending podcast from music to podcasts, but that, alas, doesn’t appear to work.
The iPod is an awesome device, but it does have its shortcomings.
Also, am I the only one that is disgruntled that Apple wants my credit card # just to register at the iTunes store? I just want album art. I don’t plan to buy any songs, and if I do, I’ll surrender my card number then. It’s almost like Macy’s asking for your credit card number before you enter the store, even if you are just browsing. Sheesh!!!
Offline retailers aren’t even allowed to store your card number beyond the time required to process your transaction. Just look at all the trouble TJX Companies is in for their data breach.
Regards,
TM
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