iTunes is as the User Does, but Documentation Would Help
For the most part, I have little complaint about iTunes, as I have found that iTunes is as powerful and usable as the user is organized. On the other hand there are a number of the ?little things? that could be improved for better user experience. In reality, anyone that goes about handling a collection in an off-the-cuff manner is going to experience issues should their collection grow beyond a certain tipping point. I find that playlists are often underutilized by people with small, let alone sizable, iTunes libraries; I have seen enough shared libraries on the lab network to see this first hand time-after-time over the past 3+ years as students have come and gone.
Fortunately for me, I am someone anal by nature when it comes to my collections?I like to be able to easily find things once I have more than a few?and after juggling a large media collection for the better part of two decades, by the time I first started using iTunes in my lab back in 2005, one of the first things I did with the 2,500+ select tracks that I ripped from my CD collection was experiment with the organizational features in iTunes. By the time I began ripping the entirety of my CD collection onto my Mac at home in early 2006, I had already come up with a folder/playlist tree structure for organizing my music as well as a ?standard? for the metadata entered for each track (e.g., artists in the Last, First format for proper sorting, genre/style format based on information from AllMusic.com, 300 x 300 pixel cover art scanned from the liner notes, etc.).
Alas, as has been noted, even with the amount of playing around and organizing that I did, some features that have been a part of iTunes for some time were lost on me and I am far from a novice computer user. One such feature, which is not a major priority so much as a curiosity was the ability to browse by artist/album as one can on an iPod. It was not until a few months ago when someone else made an inquiry about this that I became aware that in List or Album view you can activate the category browser. So now, should I ever be in the mood to listen to an album all the way through, I now know that the horrid option of creating artist- or album-specific playlists is unnecessary.
A major part of the problem here is that iTunes, in fact most of the iApps and other pre-installed goodies from Apple, despite their user friendliness lack adequate documentation. Apple, and a number of software developers, could take a page out of Macromedia?s book on built-in help and tutorials. Every version of Macromedia?s Web Studio that I have owed had wonderful tutorials built into the software to get a new user up and running or to introduce legacy users to new features. In fact, the Studio tutorials for Dreamweaver, Fireworks, Flash and Freehand, seemed like something that would have come out of Jobs? II Apple.
Simply put, it is no longer 1984 and despite how user friendly many of Apple?s application can be, they, like many applications today, no longer include user manuals. As such, either the developer needs to implement built-in tutorials or at the very least make sure that search-based help covers every single feature of the software in detail.
Audiphile Rule #2: Separates Are Better
The addition of multimedia support has only made iTunes more complex, especially for the casual user. iTunes should be just that, an audio media manger and Apple should have introduced a second application for video content. From the user perspective Apple could create an iMedia suite with and interactive (smart) source list. The iMedia suite would consist of three apps. The first would be the legacy iTunes for music (user library and internet radio), podcasts and audiobooks. iWatch, or whatever Apple coins, would be for managing video content and iSmart would be for anything related specifically to the iPhone (Apple?s smartphone). Much more separation than that will only serve to introduce complexities in the opposite direction.
To make things easy for the user, the source list would sense which iMedia apps are open and only include items related to those apps in the source list when the accompanying application is active. For instant, I loathe cell phones and I do not download media or collect video content, so my (smart) source list would only contain items related to audio. Should I start collecting television shows and movies then when in iTunes the source list would include a ?Video? in the source list under ?Library?, if I select that option, the Mac would automatically switch to iWatch and the source list would change to items related to video content save the Audio option under ?Library? to go back to iTunes. The Smart source list would be something like the Project Gallery in Office:mac, but better. Thus the user is never burdened with options for content that they are not utilizing at the time, but they still retain the ability to quickly access all media from a single location given which iMedia apps are open.
Complete iTunes 7?s Sorting Options
One area where iTunes has not completed the implementation of a feature is in artist sorting management. The addition of the Album Artist field and later sort fields in iTunes 7 has made it possible for those of us in the know to properly sort albums by artist in iTunes regardless of what is actually contained in the ?Artist? field without having to resort to flagging albums that are not compilations as compilations. The addition of these sorting tags is great if you only organize your music
in iTunes but it leaves those of us that have enabled the ?Keep iTunes Music folder organized? option in iTunes? preferences SOL. It stands to reason that if someone has gone out of their way to select that option, which is not set by default, they chose to do so for a reason.
Now, using the iTunes 7 sorting features I could theoretically have ?Mary J. Blige? in the ?Artist? and ?Album Artist? fields and place ?Blige, Mary J.? the ?Sort Artist? and ?Sort Album Artist? fields so that her albums are correctly sorted under ?B? when browsing my music library or playlists. Good. The addition of the sort fields also means that for her debut album
What?s The 411? , the title track and track 8, ?I Don?t Want To Do Anything?, that have guest artists can be properly tagged as ?Mary J. Blige featuring Grand Puba? and ?Mary J. Blige with K-Ci Hailey?, respectively. The ?Sort Artist? field has priority over the ?Artist? field and will keep those tracks properly grouped within the album block. Good again. Unfortunately this smart sorting does not translate to the artist folders in the user?s iTunes Music folder; the artist folders are still being named based on the contents of the ?Artist? field. At the very least, artist folders should have begun defaulting to naming based on the ?Album Artist? field in iTunes 7.
In this scenario described above, the tracks for Mary?s premiere album are separated into three different artist folders on the hard drive. I, and others, have always found this to be a problem from the outset with iTunes as it defeats the purpose of having music files sorted by artist then album; so much for the organized iTunes library option in iTunes? preferences. Prior to iTunes 7 this required any number of workarounds. The first was to classify the tracks as being apart of a compilation, but then the album is misfiled under iTunes Music > Compilations instead of within the appropriate artist folder. The second option, which I implemented in my iTunes library, was to forgo acknowledging guest artists and list the artist in the (Last, First) naming convention so that proper sorting occurs both within iTunes and in the iTunes Music folder.
With iTunes 7?s sorting capabilities the default naming for artist folders in organized libraries should have defaulted to the following logic:
Quote
IF SortAlbumArtist NOT empty THEN ArtistFolderName = SortAlbumArtist
ELSE IF AlbumArtist NOT empty THEN ArtistFolderName = AlbumArtist
ELSE IF SortArtist NOT empty THEN ArtistFolderName = SortArtist
ELSE ArtistFolderName = Artist
Not having iTunes respect the nature of that option I not a good thing, particularly if the user has used that organization outside of iTunes as I have. My Music Collector database links to the tracks in my iTunes music library, so if I were to fully utilize the sorting features of iTunes, thousands of links in Music Collector would be broken because the artist folders would change from their current (Last, First) naming convention to (First Last). I actually have filled the ?Album Artist? and sort fields should Apple ever complete this feature, but for now because the logic described above is not followed, I stand with the 7th revision of iTunes 7 still having to resort to a pre-iTunes 7 workaround.
Speaking of Sorting? WTF
One has to wonder what they were smoking in Cupertino when the iTunes developers decided on the Byzantine Microsoftian implementation of adding sort fields to multiple tracks. With any other tag, if you want to add say a year, cover art, etc., across several tracks all one needs to do is select the tracks to be updated, invoke the Get Info dialog and update the appropriate fields. Yet, for some reason, with the sorting fields the can only modify one track then they have to select the others they wish update then apply the sort fields. Huh? That type of New > Folder? unnecessary extra step stuff may be something that Windows users are accustomed to, but it has no place in an Apple application. The worst part is that this ?feature? is still not documented in iTunes help as of iTunes 7.7; in fact, sorting fields are not documented in iTunes help at all.
(? Anyone familiar with Windows know that creating new folders is a two-step process in Windows, but a one step process in the Mac OS. These kinds of subtle differences are part of the reason Mac users can be more productive, but applying sort fields in iTunes reverses that trend.)
Better Library Management
In terms of library management, many others have validly griped about the way in which iTunes handles multiple libraries. Granted, in the general case, if one properly organizes their music library by using folders/playlists and properly tags their content instead of relying on whatever Gracenote or the iTunes Store provides, then there is no real need for a user to have more than a singular library on their primary computer. On the other hand in those instances where someone wishes to quickly switch to an alternate library for whatever reason?for instance on a family computer where there may be a shared library for all users along with personal music libraries that are account specific?it should be as easy to switch libraries from within iTunes as it is to switch user accounts in OS X.
Allow iPods to Play Nice With Folders
The last incomplete/smi-implemented feature in iTunes is another case of application stinginess. In iTunes, folders are recognized as (manual) smart playlists. As such, when using a feature such as Party Shuffle, folders appear in the source dropdown menu with other playlists, as they should. Unfortunately, unless Apple has addressed this in the latest models, that functionality does not carry over to iPods. As such, one has to manually create smart folders on their iPod?how many people know that this is possible let alone
how to do this?that are similar to the folders in iTunes. For people with few playlists and folders, the omission of folder recognition is a minor inconvenience, but for people like me that have well over 100 playlists organized into 30+ folders and subfolders, having to manually recreate iPod-specific smart playlists or, just as bad, create redundant smart folders in iTunes is an exercise in tedium.
Dual Ripping/Downloading
In terms of overall functionality iTunes is pretty complete, so there is not much in the way of new features that I can think of short of morphing it into a fully blown media management database package like Delicious Vinyl, Music Collector, etc. I do have to admit that while that being able to catalog my physical media in the same application in which the music is ripped to the hard drive is nice, a great many iTunes users at this point and as time goes on, will have little to no physical media to catalog.
On the other hand, a nice addition to iTunes would be the ability to create a dual library. Huh? What I mean is have iTunes have the ability to create a single library with both a high quality and portable version of songs added to iTunes. For instance, I chose to rip my CD collection at 160 Kbps when I started building my iTunes library. The reason for this was not because of the capacity of the hard drives on what was then my new Power Mac G5?I could always upgrade to larger hard drives?but due to the unknown of how many songs would make their way to my iPod. While I knew that larger capacity iPods would be coming down the pike, I did not see myself needing to (rapidly) replace the 60GB iPod I purchased a few months before I got my G5.
Using information from my old MusiCatalog database and the roughly 2,500 songs I ripped to my work PC, I estimated that I would actually listen to upwards of 6,000 to 7,000 of the nearly 19,000 songs (32 to 37 percent) I have on CD and vinyl. Thus, I attempted to balance that number with the bit rate at which I would rip songs into iTunes; basically a blind attempt to maximize the bit rate (quality) for a given number of songs within a fixed capacity (60 GB).
Well now that all of my CDs are ripped and I now know that I have 3,050 of 13,548 selected (22%). I also know that a lower percentage of songs will be selected from my vinyl collection because with few exceptions, nearly every single LP I have has since been supplemented with a CD version. The bulk of my vinyl collection consists of 12? singles and that translates into more media, but less select tracks. I now realize that I could have ripped my music at a much higher bit rate. Of course, for the sake of battery life, 160 Kbps is perhaps good enough for my iPod(s) regardless, but a (much) higher bit rate would be desirable for playing music at home on higher-end equipment.
It would be nice if iTunes had the ability to perform a double rip (double download for iTS) so that the user can easily add a high and moderate quality of their music into iTunes. That is, when you rip a CD, you would have the option to do standard single rip, as iTunes does now, or dual rip. If the user selects the dual rip then iTunes will rip two versions of the CD?s tracks in a single session. The first version will be a high quality format and bit rate, say 256 Kbps AAC or Apple Lossless. The second copy of the track would be a more portable version such as 128Kbps AAC (space conservation) or 192 Kbps MP3 (universal compatibility).
To prevent confusion, the tracks would only appear once in iTunes listings, but the software would recognize that the tracks refer to two files. Therefore, if information is updated for a given track or tracks, both audio files are simultaneously updated. Also, iTunes would select the appropriate format for playback. For instance, a user could rip a CD as Apple Lossless/160 Kbps AAC. When music is played via iTunes on their computer, the Apple Lossless versions of the songs are used. When the user syncs their iPod, the AAC files are transferred to the device. (In the case of the iTunes Store, if you purchase and iTunes+ track, you get both the 256 Kbps and a 128 Kbps version of the song.)
Adding a feature such as this eliminates the need to have two separately ripped libraries with different formats/bit rates. Also, the nightmare of keeping two similar libraries properly synchronized or worse yet, having a single library with duplicate entries is eliminated.
Conclusion
As I stated at the beginning, iTunes is for the most part quite complete from my perspective. Of course I do not have video content, audiobooks, podcasts or iPhone content so I see iTunes primarily as what it should be: an audio manager. I think that if Apple separates the major media types, fixes/completes the little things and includes excellent documentation iTunes could be that much better.
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