[Chris Breen]

zenwave said:

I am talking about the 'Browse' columns, of which there are only three:
Genre, Artist, Album.

Ah, I see. How about selecting Classical in the Genre column, All in the Artist column, All in the Album column, and in the list below adding a Composer heading?

[zenwave]

Chris Breen said:

Ah, I see. How about selecting Classical in the Genre column, All in the Artist column, All in the Album column, and in the list below adding a Composer heading?

I do that, but it doesn't really achieve the same level of clarity in being able to see all of the dozens of artists who have performed the works of a given composer.

Now I can achieve this by typing a composer's name in the search field, and then clicking on the Composer drop down menu .... but this article was about re-imagining iTunes, not jury rigging it, no?

If iTunes is positioned as the hub of our digital lives, it should meet the needs of more than just pop music fans.

Oh yeah, and FLAC support!

[IVIIVIi4ck3y27]

There's lots of things that iTunes should be able to do and sometimes I feel that Apple has left them out, by design, because they want to make the iPod the primary appealing solution and render other solutions less desirable. That's all well and good but for those that own iPods and don't always carry them every last second out of the day, it's nice to have additional options that are flexible and suit a users' needs.

As an iPod owner, I still prefer to use my Shuffle as a standalone and to use MP3 CD's in my car. With my car's stereo only playing MP3 or WMA discs, making an MP3 CD should be trivial even if the original source audio in iTunes is an AAC or even a DRM'ed AAC. If Apple can reencode the file to a format to burn on a regular CD, it suuuuurely could do us the favor and reencode the AAC or DRM'ed AAC as an MP3 (which will still lose quality) vs. requiring workarounds like burning DRM'ed AAC files to CD only to re-rip (same basic idea just more of a speed bump in the middle of the freeway, many of us will still do it). Anti-piracy measures notwithstanding, and I understand partially why, it just generally makes desired usability and intent considerably more of a pain. Pure and simple. If they want to improve the user experience, they're going to have to answer the call on aggravating elements like this. I'd even like to see an offering to trade up to these other formats with what little DRM'ed content I have. I still prefer to buy CD's for this reason and while I do use iTMS on occasion... the user experience and choice of format is more appealing to me, plus I get to keep a hard copy for archival purposes, complete with all of the actual physical content. Until Apple makes the experience seamless... iTMS is secondrate.

Better yet... how about an option on the iTunes store as to whether we want to buy particular formats and to make it standardized as to whether we buy iTunes, iTunesPlus, or other options? With Amazon and Napster and others moving to non-DRM options with multiple formats... Apple could do well to open the options for MP3 or Ogg or lossless even if end-users have to learn to expect to pay a premium for certain options. That'd be more worthy of an "Advanced" tab anywhere than what is included in Advanced in preferences. Apple doesn't have to make it out there in everyone's face... as many could probably live with the base format and be happy (assuming the app. worked as I think it should [see above paragraph]), but... for those that are more of an audiophile (I can't say that I am, I'm more middle of the road) or those that would pay to save a few aggravating steps only to have recompression of a compressed file... I think many would prefer to get a format that's usable everywhere in anything, even if file size were to increase by a fair share (i.e. higher bitrate MP3 vs. similarly in an AAC).

Beyond all of that... with Apple moving many of their apps. to 64-bit, and with an application that hits the hardware when it rips tracks... I believe that it's high time for Apple to rethink iTunes (as Chris mentioned) and rebuild the app. in Cocoa-64.

I could likely come up with considerably more... but the reality is, iTunes is still a pretty elegant app. It has a lot of downsides to be fair (and more than it's share of odd bugs... the odd quirk of inserting a CD into my iMac only to have it run CDDB and lose the disc only to have to eject from the keyboard, reinsert, and have it work is truly an odd quirk to say the least... and I've seen a few Macs with this same issue), but... it's still my favorite (sorry Audion) and it's interface is lightyears ahead of where everyone was at the time Apple bought them, in many ways it still is, and is a tremendous improvement over where Soundjam was at that time (Audion was better but still not as good as iTunes IMHO).

[Lisamacnewton]

One word.
Skins.
:)

[IVIIVIi4ck3y27]

I think the whole skin thing died out around the time iTunes came out. None of the players that had skin support had much of anything in the wake of skins that was in anyway designed around usability (and as someone that went from Audion to iTunes... iTunes allure was that it had a usable interface and not something designed by a teenager who thinks 4 pixel text in a playlist is "teh cool!"). Form over function... leave skinning to the wannabes. LoL iTunes is better than any secondrate skin for any alternative player. Full end stop.

[zenwave]

Also, Apple should buy Potion Factory's "Tangerine" and integrate it the way they did Cover Flow. Tangerine is great for creating gym playlists by organizing track by BPM.

Jon

[alphab]

I would rip the Sync part out of it.
iTunes should be about songs, ok maybe video too, but pictures, contacts and calendars ???
All the iPod/iPhone/TV sync should be left to its own app, that could be called, I don't know, iSync ? ;o)

[Lisamacnewton]

Wellp, I'm 48, not a teen satisified with low pixel image crap, an attention span of 3 nano seconds, and I'm tired of brushed aluminum and blue. I'd like to have a choice viewing what I need to view day after day. It can be done fairly easily, tastefully and small-so why not? When Real, Rhapsody and MS Player had skins (back in the '90's and early 00's) I didn't go hog wild with 9,387 skins, but downloaded 2 that were easy on the eyes and were different, readable colors.......when I got tired of one, voila, the other.

I don't think its a totally wasted request.

[FlyingWhiteKite]

Huh I don't think that's very difficult. Isn't it intuitive that you make a playlist and you put the songs in it you want on your CD?
What should be better in your opinion?

[folklore]

The biggest missing feature for me is a family media server function. I don't care if its iTunes or a stand-alone app, but I'd really like a better solution.

Basically, I want a single repository for all of my media files for the whole family. I want one place that I put all the media, and everyone can access it without fuss. I add a file to the media server, and it shows up in everyone's libraries automagically. I add a file to the media server, and everyone can add it to a playlist or iPod - which can't be done with iTunes' current sharing. I can sort of do what I want with NAS, but I have to manually manage the files. That is, I have to manually muck about with both the file structure on the NAS and the add the files to various iTunes libraries around the house since there's no way to subscribe to watch folders or anything in iTunes. And the performance streaming files over the network is bad bad bad in iTunes - even over ethernet. So I end up with at least two copies (mine and my wife's) of every media file I have. It's a lot of wasted disk space.

So, a media server app (or new functionality in iTunes) would rock. It should work even with DRM'ed files from the iTS so long as all the computers are authorized under the same account.

[jamus]

1. I agree about Soundcheck. It needs some buffing up.
2. The MP3 ripper in iTunes really takes a beating from CDStack not only in quality but features. It is great for noobs, but give some of us access to higher level ripping.
3. Please make it work better on Windows! I can't tell you how many friends love their iPods but hate iTunes. It is so slow on my PC compared to the version on my Mac. Surely Apple can do something to speed that up some.

[dibble9012]

The ability to have separate hidden "libraries" for your devices.

So.. on my mac I have lossless audio files and high resolution video files for my appletv. But these take up too much space for my iphone, or are just plain not compatible. I'd like iTunes to seamlessly convert my library (with options set by me) to be compatible with different devices. All I ever see are my high quality files, but when I sync my devices iTunes automatically copies my high quality files and converts them to be compatible with my device. Kind of like iTunes handles the iPod Shuffle.

And of course, I'd like to be able to BUY and store HD movies and TV shows on my mac, it requires a lot of storage, but let me deal with that.

Finally, this will probably never happen, at least for a very long time, but I'd love to be able to import movies and tv show DVD's just like I do with CD's.

[tbsteph]

I, for one, oppose any major changes to iTunes that just make it different - not more functional. Examples of what I mean would be Microsoft Office 2008 and "ribbons" or, Windows XP and Vista. Sure, both "added" features but, why move existing things around just to "move things around".

[macwilf]

garyi is right about the CD-burning-procedure. Of course one should only have to select the tracks one wants to burn, click Burn, being prompted to put in a CD if that is not done, being told that there are too many tracks to burn on a single CD if that be the case and being offered the solution to burn more than one CD. Give a name to the CD. Burn. Done.
And about all the features - what about having an Easy mode and an Advanced mode? Like one has on most scanners, for instance?