Thin Ice

Why I still don’t like iTunes

Curious to see what improvements might have been made, I started it up. It asked me a few questions, and I could quickly see the big reason that I was not going to use it: it will not work directly with WMA files. iTunes demands that all such files are converted to Apple’s proprietary (but not licensable) format from Microsoft’s proprietary (but licensable) format. It does not demand this of MP3 (another proprietary, licensable format) files. Most of my files have been ripped to WMA-Lossless and even if thought AAC was a lovely format, I simply don’t have another 100GB or so spare disk-space to accommodate converted files. [---]

Moving on…

I allowed iTunes to look for music files to add to my library. It didn’t look beyond my root drive, so I had to tell it where else to go to find the root folder for the files I keep on my local drives. All of those files are backed up elsewhere, so I felt safe running this experiment.

After a while, it added about 5000 MP3 files to the library – i.e. passing over the WMA files. While this was in process I noticed that the music file monitor for my iRiver portable device was getting excited about something and had started a lengthy reprocessing of my music files. Sho’ nuff, iTunes had not only touched all of my MP3 files (the file-system Date Modified tag was altered), but it had re-tokenized all of the Artist fields, so that instead of using the ‘;’ delimiter, it now used ‘/’. Was this *really* necessary? If someone at Apple thought that the latter was more aesthetically pleasing, then they should have ASKED ME. [---]

I was about to write about the lack of special views for Artists and Albums, but the Browse button, top right (looks like an eye) opens some top-loading panes that allow filtering by Genre, Artist and Album. These do allow you to multiply select items, to create filters ?, but there is no way to do this for Composer, which is a big drawback for those with substantial Classical and Jazz collections. [--]

Apple does not expose an Album Artist field, which is very helpful in filtering a large collection (even just scanning my list of [Contributing] Artists in WMP is time consuming). [-]

Like WMP, iTunes has trouble with tokenizing Artist fields. Except that after retokenizing all the artist fields in nearly 5000 MP3 files it still presents every track’s list of artists as one conglomerated string e.g. “Jo Partridge/Barry Morgan/Ken Freeman/Jeff Wayne/Ra” – and that string is truncated, without so much as a tooltip to show me the entire string.[-]

iTunes does not find, play or otherwise acknowledge WMV (video) files. Even if it didn’t play them back, I sure as hell would like library software to LIST EVERYTHING.

Minor quibbles

I hate modal dialogs that could be replaced with more graceful modifications of the current display. For example, click on “Music Store” in the left pane. I get a big Apply white right pane with “iTunes Music Store” AND overlaid is an ugly little dialog saying it could not connect and to please remedy the matter. Could that not have been incorporated as text in the main display area, like a smart 404 error page in an internet browser?

Ugly little Options dialogs that do not seem to be stylistically part of the program. For example, those for Library and Visualization Options don’t seem to be from the same program as the Get Info dialog.

iTunes doesn’t automatically discover video files in your My Videos folder.

No context-sensitive help.

Things I Do Like

This is not an exhaustive list, as the major problems above preclude any day to day use of iTunes for my collection. This is what I found after playing around with the software for about an hour as I wrote these impressions.

[++] The search facility is VERY fast. I like that it filters the view on the fly as I type in my search string. (WMP’s search doesn’t fly….it drifts…like continents). iTunes also includes the Composer field in the search scope, which WMP still does not do. If I keep adding words then I can quickly filter by multiple criteria e.g. “Porter Ella” is going to give me all Cole Porter compositions sung by Ella Fitgerald. I’m still waiting for a Picasa-like Google media manager that will offer me more advanced syntax like “Porter -Ella" i.e. all Cole Porter compositions NOT sung by Ella Fitzgerald. … And then, I would save that as a playlist (optionally dynamic).

[-]I did notice that it was relatively easy to have some text in the search box that generated a nil result (no tracks found), and there was no feedback elsewhere on the screen to indicate that a filter had been applied. It looks like you’ve lost all your music when this has happened.

[+] The “Show Duplicate Files” (based on both title and artist being repeated) filter is handy for house-keeping purposes. However it is handicapped by the lack of a “File Path” field so that I can see why I have a duplicate. I have to right click > Show Song File (or Get File Info), on each and every file to discover this information.

[+] Folder and Playlist customization. I tried “File > New Folder” and got a new top level item in the left pane. I kept trying to drag tracks there, but it wasn’t until I searched through the Help file for a while that I discovered that I could only put Playlists or other folders there. This is another area where embedded help would be helpful.

[_] Auto-Complete was, in general, much more useful than that in WMP, which is so broken as to be useless (who needs auto-complete for track numbers????)

In short, I cannot use software that