Thursday, March 11, 2004
Restoring My Passion for iTunes
Just as Microsoft Office has the tools you need to create an outline, a budget or a presentation, iLife offers all of the tools you need for your work outside the office. When you’re ready to kick back and create something spectacular, there’s no better resource than iLife.
I’m an avid user and unabashed fan of Apple’s iLife. It makes my life simple, easy, and enjoyable. I spend large swaths of my day with my iPod, iTunes, iPhoto, and have weekly visits with iMovie and GarageBand. So it’s with tough-love that I now criticize an application that I’m so in love with.
I adore iTunes. It’s everything that a music management application should be, but I find that that’s not enough. My biggest issues, you know the ones that are turning my torrid love affair into a mutually beneficial friendship, are: 1) iTunes inability to accept more than two sources of music; 2) how iTunes currently handles music genres; and 3) how iTunes handles songs with multiple artists.
So for this post, I’ve decided to focus on what could restore my passion for iTunes.
I’ve spent an incredible amount of time, trying to mentally decipher, how iTunes could better serve my music needs. Some background about me may be useful in your evaluation of my needs.
I’m one of many users, who have “large"—ten’s of thousands of songs—music libraries. I store my primary music collection on a LaCie d2 250GB FireWire hard drive. The drive stores over 1,500 artists, with over 12,000 songs. I’m also a laptop user. My primary computer is the 15” PowerBook G4, at 867MHz, with a 80GB Hitachi drive. I own the 40GB iPod, and had purchased the 5Gb, and 20GB iPods before it.
I am also a frequent purchaser from the iTunes Music Store. And while I may never reach top purchaser status, I have spent thousands of dollars in the store to date. I should mention that even before the iTunes Music Store, I routinely set aside $150 per month for music purchases—music, books, and movies are my primary entertainment spending avenues. So, I transferred my spending on CDs to iTMS, and then, unfortunately added to it, buy large numbers of impulse buys hasten by VH1 specials such as “Behind the Music”, “I Love the 80s”, and ‘Driven.” I love iTunes and iLife, and the joy it has brought to my life.
1) iTunes Inability to Accept More than Two Sources of Music
So if you familiar with iTunes, you know that it allows you your music ‘Library’, and your iPod or other MP3 player as a music source. This is great, except it’s not flexible enough. I’m a laptop user. I never thought it would happen, but two years ago a PowerBook G4 replaced my custom built mini-tower as my primary computer. I’ve upgraded my laptop’s hard drive twice, from 20GBs to a40GBs, then from 40GBs to 80GBs. I image, I’ll be at 80Gbs for awhile, since it seems the likelihood of a 120GB or 250GB laptop drive, isn’t on this years horizon.
My laptop’s limited space is support by LaCie. The LaCie d2 drives allowed me to make the transition to a laptop far less painful than I had expected. To support my digital life, I have 4 LaCie d2 250GB drives. One drive each for music, movies, and television, and the fourth drive for additional file storage and project workspace. I’m also looking at adding the LaCie Terabyte Drive to my collection, but that’s another story.
So my pain and disillusionment is caused by the fact that I can’t truly manage my LaCie Music drive using iTunes, without damaging my iTunes Library, or going through a lot of trickery. ITunes will not recognize my LaCie drive for what it is, a secondary music source and act accountably.
So to solve issue number one, my request to Apple and the iTunes development team, is to allow iTunes to acceptable “mountable” drives as additional music sources. I expect this requests falls under both the ‘feature request’ and ‘design and ease of use’ sections of Apple’s feedback form. I believe the request is essentially for users with large music libraries. How the feature would work is to allow users to designate “Music Drives” for use with iTunes. A music drive would be an internal or external hard drive that can be mounted in iTunes like the iPod. Obviously, plug and play would be great, but even a minor manual configuration would be acceptable to me, and I’m certain others in my situation. How I envision this would work is, when my laptop is at home, and I plug into my daisy chained FireWire drives, my ‘Music’ drive is mounted on my desktop. If I then open iTunes, the drive would display with its name, just as my iPod does. It would contain it’s own searchable library, ratings, etc., just as the iPod. Dragging and dropping to and from it, would be acceptable (slight difference from the iPod).
The left side of iTunes would then look like a combination of the current navigation system and the Mac OS Finder under Mac OS X 10.3 Panther. The mountable music spaces would be the Library, Radio, Music Store, my iPod, and mounted Music Drives (I currently have one, but I expect my collection to keep growing). A divider to give a nice visual separation from drives versus play lists would follow these items, and then the play lists.
My thought is each mountable drive, like the iPod would store its own library, playlist, and ratings files. Since these are XML files, they wouldn’t take up too much space, and can sit right on the media that’s to be mounted in iTunes. To keep things simple for your average user, an option to turn the function on could be added to the ‘Advanced’ pane of the Preferences menu. A simple check mark option stating ‘Activate the Mount menu’. If checked then an additional menu would appear in iTunes, after the ‘Advanced’ menu, or anywhere before the ‘Window’ menu. This menu would give you the ability to select a drive for mounting in iTunes, updating the drive index (Library), un-mount, and any other options that may be needed.
This feature/functionality would allow those of us who are adopting the ‘digital lifestyle’ early and with much enthusiasm to truly use iTunes and iLife to manage the rest of our lives.
More on issues two and three to follow.
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