2008-01-27

Nits List - iTunes Edition

I love iTunes, usually. It's a great app and one that is always open in my dock. It does have its issues. Most of them are minor. Here's my nit list:


  • iPod syncing isn't as good as it could be. It needs the same interface you get when building smart playlists. For example, I might want to sync the 3 newest unwatched episodes of some shows, but the 3 oldest unwatched shows of others if I'm catching up on a season. I could do this by generating the playlists first and then syncing those, but why should I clutter my library with playlists only meant for the mobile device? Update: Ehh, maybe I just talked myself out of this one. I could just make an iPod sync lists folder to hide all of the playlist mucking.

  • You should be able to drag a TV Show directly into the TV Shows library source. As it is, you have to add it to movies and then go set the type to TV Show. Yuck.

  • Music videos are a video type, but they aren't a type in the library. Movies and TV Shows are, why not Music Videos?

  • The iTunes store needs a wishlist in the store so it can follow me across the computers I log into.

  • iTunes needs a "look again goofball" function for when it forgets where half of you library lives, even though the place it thinks the files live is the very place that they are. If anyone has a script to auto-fix (not auto-delete) the !'d tracks, let me know.

  • The albums list on iPods needs to have a threshold applied. 1 track off of an album is not an album! I have a couple hundred actual albums loaded in my library. Unfortunately, I'll have many times that amount in the Albums list when browsing the iPod. This forces me to flood my playlists with playlists that are the real albums in my library.

  • Building on the last one, they finally added folders to the library list. This makes it nicer to organize the albums in my playlists, but my iPod doesn't respect the folders, so it is of little use to me as most of my listening is on the iPod.

  • I want to remove an item from my library within a playlist. At the least, give me a "Show in Library" right next to the "Show in Finder".

  • Don't stop background syncs because a dialog has been popped up. I don't know if this is still an issue, but many times I've cursed at the not-updating podcasts on the Apple TV only to go find some message box in iTunes that had halted all downloads and syncing. I shouldn't have to check-in with iTunes every day to keep the related systems running.



Edit: Jason reminded me of the one that irks me the most (message boxes stop syncing). I have added it.

1 comment:

Jason said...

I'm in agreement, and at the moment I can't think of anything additional to add. This sums it up very well. You did forget that alert dialogs shouldn't always be modal though. Don't stop my syncing because there might be an update, or some other nuisance.

I'll have to look into a script to fixup the libary...

I tried using OpenID to log my comment tonight. No dice. Great concept, crappy implementation.