What I wish Steve Jobs would say today (but won't)

Given today's big Mac hoopla, everyone has been making predictions about what Apple will be releasing. Of course you have your iPhones, your iTVs, and your full screen video iPods, but what I am really really really hoping for are a couple of upgrades to our humble, faithful companion iTunes.

iTunes? How boring is that? In comparison to iPhones and mystic landing page images, an updated iTunes is pretty pedestrian. Over the years however I have built up a fairly significant list of upgrades I'd like in iTunes. Every big product announcement has me hoping for at least a couple of them, and every product announcement leaves me unfulfilled. So in the hopes of a Macworld SF Miracle, here are 8 things that would make iTunes that much better.

• For the most part this list is unordered (and related), with the exception of this one. This is my all time number one iTunes wish: to handle large libraries with even a remote sense of grace. I know that I am way past edge case here, but my computer almost dies when I try to throw my entire 1.6TB music library at it. I gave up on iTunes as a library management tool sometime past 100GB, and only dared give it another go when Coverflow was too beautiful to resist any longer. It was not pretty. It took over 12 hours to process my IDv3 tags. Then it tried to find missing artwork (another couple of hours) and determine "gapless song playback," at which point I decided enough was enough and put my computer out of it's misery. On my PC, Winamp only took 45 minutes to process everything.

• Let me see who is listening to my library over the network. Every day as I pack up for home I notice that there are people connected to my library (also it's kind of weird that the only way I can easily see that people are connected to my library is to quit the app). Who are these people?

• Along those lines, who in my office named their iTunes library "The Magic Man"? It is extremely cruel of Apple not to let me know these things. It is killing me. (Incidentally co-workers, I am "Mark's Soft Rock Favorites of Yesterday and Today", and you really should check out the new Malajube in my library. It is awesome.)

• Apple needs to buy Last.fm and build the audioscrobbler functionality right into iTunes. It is the best thing to happen to music since the creation of the MP3. It would also greatly increase iTunes Music Store sales since the current recommendation engine in the Music Store pretty much sucks.

• Now that we know who is who on my local network, and we are scrobbling all the music played, how about local stats? I'd love to know who the most popular artist is based on the network I am on, whether it is my office, the local coffee shop, airport terminal, wherever. If you subscribe to the High Fidelity theory that your tastes define you, there could be some really interesting things to do with that stuff.

• Where is the iTunes API? I know it is possible to manipulate and extend iTunes, but you'd get a lot more innovation if it was as easy to write an iTunes plugin as it is writing a Firefox extension. This is one area where Songbird could really shine if they hurried up and released stuff.

• Let me send a link to a song over IM or e-mail to someone on my network. There is probably RIAA pressure not to allow something like this, but it would be so much nicer to send a tinyURL-style link to a friend I want to share a song with than to tell them to browse to my library and hope they find the exact song I want them to hear.

• There had always been pretty serious technical challenges to this, but after seeing Winamp pull it off with Winamp Remote there is no reason I should not be able to listen to my home library somewhere else. Especially if both computers involved are linked to the same iTunes Music Store account. In the meantime I will have to stick with Slim Server.

As you can see, most of these revolve around making iTunes more social. When Microsoft launched the Zune a couple of months ago their slogan was "Welcome to the Social." While it is a pretty lame slogan, the idea is a good one and more than due. In the 6 years since iTunes was released, it has not really grown very much. Digital music is a far different animal than it was in 2001 and it is time our old friend learned some new tricks.

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Posted by Mark Allen on Tuesday, January 9, 2007 Comments (3)