What’s wrong with iTunes
While there are things about iPod and iTunes that are well-executed (e.g. AirTunes, podcasting support), there are lots of important things that are broken to this day. These things are all fixable.
- No gapless playback. This is number 1. Why is there a little gap between my songs? It should play them back exactly as they appeared on the recording I ripped them from. iTunes can be setup so that the gap becomes less noticeable (turn on crossfading, with the crossfade set to zero seconds), but then it still fades in the start of the every track. iPod, on the other hand, is completely ridiculous—inserting a gap of up to a second between every song it plays.
iTunes “solves” this problem with the deplorable Join Tracks command (see also: iTunes can’t burn gapless CDs, either, even though it says it can). - Poor format support. Dear Apple: Whenever you’re ready, we invite you to join us here in 2005. Real, VLC, and Winamp are hanging out in the hot tub, and they’re having a great time.
In all seriousness, there’s no good reason that I can think of for iTunes and iPod to not support all the other lovely music formats out there. How about FLAC, Ogg, Monkey’s Audio, aacPlus, Real, WMA, everything. At the least, give us an extensible input plugin API for iTunes like Winamp has. I have to assume that Apple’s strategic reason is that they want any music playable by iTunes to work on an iPod. OK, fine. open up the iPod too! There’s no reason why not. If anything, it will help convert people to iTunes and iPod when all of their other music (say, ripped in WMP to WMA) will still work just fine. - I need separate EQ settings for different sets of AirTunes speakers. iTunes is smart enough to remember your volume setting for each set of AirTunes speakers, so that when I switch to “Living Room” from my laptop speakers, I don’t blow out the windows. However, it also should remember my EQ settings—in my office, for example, I have to roll off the bass quite a bit because my speakers are right up against a wall (and close to my head). In the living room, I want it flat. On my PowerBook speakers, I want to push up the low frequencies. Instead, I have to go and change it manually every time I switch speakers.
- Options screen has become congested since addition of podcasting support. What used to be a best-of-breed preferences dialog has become crowded, as more and more features are tacked on to the previous interface. To abate the confusion, Apple has put little buttons at the bottom of some tabs linking to other tabs. On the podcasting tab, it says: “Set which Podcasts are copied to your iPod: iPod Preferences.”I guess this is an ontological problem, but it still strikes me as not-quite-right.
- When you browse around your library, it interrupts playback of an album. This one’s a killer for me. I’ll browse around my library such that all the songs from one album are displayed, and double-click on the first track. It starts playing. Then, I browse elsewhere—maybe I’m adding a new album to my library, or whatever. When the first track is done playing, it doesn’t keep going! Apple should separate browsing from playing in an elegant way that doesn’t destroy the current model (i.e., “the library is the playlist”). This is something that iPod handles well—you can browse around your library all you want, and it will keep chugging through the album you were playing, until you tell it otherwise.
A quick fix to satisfy people like me would be to always keep playing an album if I start it by double clicking on it’s name, in the upper right pane of browse view. It could retain the current behavior for double-clicking on a track. #
September 1st, 2005 at 8:11 am
I could also just be a booboo fool, but I also find that the library for iTunes is a little difficult to manage. Say I add four newly ripped albums (but not, I may add, ripped in iTunes on that computer) to my /music directory. It should either automatically add those folders to the library when I start the program or have a way to select multiple files/folders to add to the library. As it is, I have to either add the whole library again or try and remember what hasn’t been added and put the folders in one by one.
That probably didn’t make much sense.
September 1st, 2005 at 9:59 am
Here’s what you should do.
Open up Finder and drill down to /music. Switch to details view and sort by Date Created. If you don’t have that, then enable it in view options (cmd-J). Or, if what you’re doing is adding subfolders to existing artist folders, or something, then you could use Date Modified instead (which is a superset of Date Created, so it will still work for new folders).
Then all you have to do is drag all the folders at the top to your library (i.e. the Library row in the source list of iTunes).
I don’t have this prob, because I have that option enabled to give iTunes complete dominion over my soul–I mean, my music folder. So my new stuff is in an ~/incoming directory. When I drag it to the library, iTunes copies it to my music directory. Then I just delete stuff out of incoming.
September 1st, 2005 at 6:59 pm
Really great new site! Is New Orleans still a non-event?
September 2nd, 2005 at 4:21 am
Hear Hear! I’m currently undergoing the task of getting my entire music collection onto my computer. I’ve experience many of those same problems. Another few I would add…
Itunes doesn’t support certain versions of ID3 tags. I’ve tried importing some files that I tagged using other programs, and Itunes doesn’t recognize them while all other media players have.
When you change ID3 tag info in itunes, it doesn’t always update the actual file. For example, when I change a song’s genre from “rock” to “hard rock” - it gets changed in itunes, but does not actually write the information in the file.
When you change the name of a folder where your songs are located, itunes ‘can’t find the file’, and you have to manually locate it.
So frustrating!
September 2nd, 2005 at 10:14 am
Justin, can you look and see what version of ID3 is unsupported? Or maybe it’s not the version, but the program that wrote the tags in the first place? I’m curious. Does it just not display any of the info at all? Or only certain fields?
About changing the name of folders, etc. — the best solution to all of these problems is just to let go. iTunes wasn’t really built for that. You should just let it “Keep iTunes music folder organized,” “Copy files to iTunes music folder when adding to library,” and “Create file names with track number.” Then, you just do all of your stuff through the iTunes interface. The only reason I even hit my iTunes folder is if I actually want a copy of the files for some reason (i.e. to transfer to a friend’s iPod in file mode).
About the genre thing — iTunes keeps a lot of its metadata about your songs in a big XML file, in the root of your music folder. I’m guessing the info is stored there. Are you using other music programs to play your iTunes music for some reason? There’s another possibility, which is that “hard rock” is not a genre in the ID3 spec, but “rock” is, so it writes “rock” to the file and then remembers “hard rock” for you, transparently, in the XML file. I’m totally speculating here though.
New Orleans is getting war headlines over here now. But still, no one seems to really care that much.
September 3rd, 2005 at 2:40 am
I haven’t been able to pinpoint the exact problem. A couple years ago, I ripped my whole cd collection down to mp3 and archived them on cd. It took a while, so I used a variety of programs. CDEX seems to be the best of the bunch. All the things I remember ripping with CDEX came out ok on itunes. I also used Real (big mistake) and Winamp as well - and probably a few other programs. If I was able to pinpoint the exact problem, I probably wouldn’t be having a problem!
September 12th, 2005 at 8:56 pm
In response to the lack of gapless playback, I ran across this free script that I hear works alright. I haven’t actually used it though. Mostly because I’m afraid of the code that makes things pretty.
http://www.dougscripts.com/itunes/scripts/scripts07.php?page=1#jointogether
August 4th, 2006 at 3:14 am
it’s really frustrating how you cannot select a folder that itunes library will automatically update from (which you can do in winamp), therefore if i can’t remember what new songs i have added, i have to re-add the whole folder, and still i don’t know which are actually the new songs because the ‘date added’ on every file turns out to be the same.