• On my MacBook Pro, a little over a third of my 120GB hard drive is taken up MP3s. All encoded at 192kbps (MP3 not AAC for better compatibility). It’s a relatively limited selection of my collection of music, but enough to be going on with.
• I’d be interested to know how people with larger music libraries use iTunes (er, that’s an invite dear reader to post in the comments…) I don’t like to scroll - something that Jakob Nielsen points out is common to the vast majority of web users. I dimly recall that in early useage of iTunes I had a long list of albums in the Source pane (this very second I’ve just noticed that the sidebar is no longer called Source, in fact it’s not called anything at all) and I found myself more frequently playing music from the visible section than the stuff hidden further down. So my iTunes setup is very much oriented towards ease of use. I don’t want to click folders open and closed in the sidebar and then have to click through to the album - I want to be able to see my top level choices as fully as possible

• right away in front of me, but I also want to see album art properly. I know, I want my cake and eat it. (This is the reason I don’t use the Quicksilver iTunes interface - too much scrolling - all well and good if you know exactly what you want to play, but who does very often - my experience is that more than half the time I just fancy listening to some music, but don’t know what.) Here’s what I’d like to see:
  • Either an interface that reflected the current Finder column view so that you made your choice of Genre (or chosen alternative) then followed through to Artist > Album. I’ve sketched this out before, but with iTunes 7, my updated, preferred option would be:
  • The aforementioned column view or retain the current multi-column browser interface, but when the album (or playlist or whatever) has been chosen and is being played, coverflow appears to display all the cover against the lovely, rather dramatic - and slightly chilly - black background, plus to the side the details of the album including performers, production, etc. gleaned from the tab of the MP3 file or preferably from a separate, but linked file.
  • Then again, I’ve just spotted that this is possible, which is quite nice (thought note still the acres of wasted space):
• 
  • Unfortunately, as soon I steer away from it or quit and restart iTunes the folder size reverts to the original, tiny version. Relevant tags: ‘irritating’, ‘frustrating’.
• Whatever, coverflow really doesn’t currently meet my requirements, at least as far as I can see - when choosing coverflow, I’m forced into a consecutive list view in the lower pane, there’s no chance to access the genre/artist/album view simultaneously. Shame.
• What’s also weird is that if I choose to play one album in the new ‘grouped with artwork’ view, it continues to play the next album in the list after the chosen one has finished. Not nice at all. It should stop at the end of the chosen album. This seems not properly thought out, but on the evidence of previous iTunes development, it may be a long time before it’s addressed.
• Interestly Daring Fireball has just written this in a post about the shuffle: “My cheap little Shuffle is far and away my favorite iPod. It ends up that the shuffle mode’s randomizer does a better job picking music I want to hear than I do. When I pick music manually, I tend to keep picking the same music I just listened to yesterday, and I bore myself.” I don’t have this exact problem, but I’d like a more intelligent way of suggesting albums than the random shuffle approach.
• The iTunes Store - like the screenshots of the movie store (apparently US-only until ‘07) is a lively, colourful place - shame something similar can’t be done for iTunes - why can’t we have something like Last.FM’s Dashboard for iTunes with thumbnails of recently played album, long unplayed, random (or weighted) suggestion based upon what you’ve been listening to recently), etc - all from the tracking info iTunes already logs and customisable for the user.
• Another improvement still lacking is that if you navigate away from the playing track to check something about another album, then switch to a different app and pause the music, you lose the current track entirely. This is another one of those basic things that seems daft to see in an app at version 7.
• Still no interface for viewing lyrics (or whatever other data you’ve added) of the currently playing song without going into Get Information for the particular track and choosing the appropriate tab. Strange that this was added (in version 5?), but not fully exploited - could be a great feature, but currently seems like a forgotten impulse. Same goes for the ability to add multiple Artwork to each track.
• iTunes does still seem to be more of a resource hog, still getting spinning beachballs from time to time and coverflow artwork sometimes takes a moment to load.
• I’ve had to restart the app a few times to rid the interface of ugly blurring on the column titles, as illustrated below:

• And finally, now that iTunes is a storefront for movies, TV, audiobooks etc, why’s it still being called iTunes? It’s similarly position to the UK’s now weirdly named ‘Carphone Warehouse‘.
• All in all, I’m still underwhelmed. The problem with iTunes is that, yes, it’s fairly configurable, but I still have infinitely less choice in terms of interface than I do if I were buying audio playback hardware where a wide range of manufacturers and designers - from Bang and Olufsen to Amstrad (…) to NAD, etc - are all working towards the best marriage of sound quality and ergonomic design. Also the best (well you know what I mean) efforts of the creative visual teams behind the music are not being interfered with by the playback device - with a CD, I can still see all the details as intended (by the record company at least…) I wish I had the brains to be a programmer.

See also: Dan Hill’s post on iTunes 7 (favourite quote: “chances are that your album’s artwork won’t be in iTunes. (You can add it yourself, which is good, but not even I bother to do that.)” Er, no, neither do I, of course I don’t, who’d be that sad? Not me, no, no, no…

[Originally published on A Personal Miscellany]

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Following on from my iTunes post, I thought I’d note for posterity my iPod useage, in other words how I’ve adapted the out of the box setup. As you can see, mine’s a fourth gen. Photo iPod, white, 60GB:

Engraved on the back is ‘This iPod belongs to ….’ - makes it near impossible to resell, but makes it mine and if it’s ever stolen, I’ll gain a little comfort from the difficulty this causes. If it’s ever lost, my name’s relatively unusual and I can be traced.

I’ve reduced the number of menu options to three - Genre / Notes / Settings. As with my iTunes setup, I use genres as a first step in deciding what to listen to - to me this makes much more sense that endlessly scrolling through album, artist or song titles. I’m not a fan at all of random selection. Notes - I’m a Quicksilver user and I’m always appending stuff to .txt files (to do list, what to listen to ideas, miscellaneous, ideas, shopping, books to read, stuff to buy, etc, etc). I upload these to my iPod on a regular basis. I no longer use my Sony Clie (can’t even find the damn thing!), though I still wistfully wait for a phone decent enough to take its place.



Griffin AirClick. How does anybody ever put up with only using the controls on the front of the iPod? I didn’t get an Apple wired remote with my iPod, but my friend Dan was kind enough to donote his to me. I used that until recently when the connection became faulty. I considered buying a new Apple remote, but I never used the radio and baulked at paying £35. I started to look around at other options and stumbled upon a mention of the Griffin and snagged a new one via Amazon resellers for about £12. It consists of a unit that plugs into the top of the iPod (bottom for 5th gen), into which the headphones then plug. The remote is wireless so no more fumbling with wires, I just put the iPod in a pocket and don’t have to bother with it again until the CD ends. The remote has play/pause, back/forward and volume up/down. I’m also turning the music up or down because of the (welcome) changes in volume. And the unit makes a lovely little hat for the iPod. Which is nice. Suggested improvement to the remote would consist of a different transport for the buttons which are too wobbly, so that it’s necessary to remember to press firmly to ensure the button operates. I don’t always remember this and am sometimes annoyed at having to press more than once. A real ‘click’ would be nice.



Shure EC3 headphones. Bought from someone Stateside for much cheaper than the English price, thankfully wasn’t nabbed for excise. Never even removed the iPod ones from their packet. Spent months trying to sort out the best way of wearing the Shures (the instructions said behind your neck and down your back - this didn’t work, was always pulling out). Then with a month to go before the two year warranty expired, one side stopped playing. The instructions on the new ones suggested another way of wearing them with the cord over the ear as before, but then snaking under the chin. Hey presto - perfect comfort. Which clearly shows how daft I am, that I didn’t think of this before. Sound is very good - much better than my previous Sony Fontopias. Could do with a bit more bass, but the sound is generally very well defined and the insulation from the outside world is more than adequate.

[Originally posted on A Personal Miscellany]

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The majority of the music I listen to is instrumental, but here I am singing along to Scott Walker’s The Electrician (be glad you can’t hear me!) As you can see from the screenshot above, I’ve got hold of a copy of the lyrics and pasted them into the text area of the MP3 file for reference (and caterwauling). However, this isn’t a particularly elegant way to access this information - indeed, it seems rather half-hearted. Perhaps Apple’s developers went this far and then observed the legal threats from record companies against all those lyric sites. If that wasn’t the case, I’m sure Apple could come up with a lovely piece of eye candy: semi-transparent text floating over your screen or similar.

Which leads me to the question posed in the title of this post - are there any ways you’d particularly like to see iTunes improved in terms of interface enhancements or ironing out niggles?

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First it was Last.fm with their ‘user-generated club‘, now the iTunes Music Store is throwing its hat into the ring by sponsoring a free, month-long music festival in London. High-profile names including Amy Winehouse, Crowded House and Stereophonics have been announced. Gigs will take place at the ICA, located just off Trafalgar Square (at the other end of the Mall from Buckingham Palace). Tickets will be awarded to iTMS competition winners so check your iTunes for details. To ensure a nice bit of closure, all gigs will be recorded and made available for purchase from the sponsors…

Via: Billboard
Link: iTunes Festival website

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I stumbled across this one via the ever-generous auspices of digg. Internet iTunes Registry (henceforward referred to as IiR) is a free, web-based service that analyses the file iTunes uses to organise your MP3s and spits out a whole slew of graphs, lists and facts that iTunes itself doesn’t provide you with access to. It’s very much a one person labour of love; if this is the sort of thing piques your interest - read on!

One caveat: using IiR requires a very brief dip into Terminal for Mac users because it requires that users upload a file in XML format. It’s a simple matter of copying and pasting a line of instructions, hitting Enter and uploading the resulting file, but it is a step that it would be much better not to have to do.

Once that’s done, you’ll see a page like the one above with some introductory stats. I apparently have a higher than average number of genres (21 against 6.7), tracks (6779 vs 1204.1), diversity (15.2603 vs 0.1366) and listening time (98.79 vs 20.02 days) which I guess proves I’m a music geek, something I knew already. There’s a whole slew of other graphs and read-outs to be found on sub-pages including Tunes Radar, Odd Facts and so on.

Quite a bit of what Internet iTunes Registry has to offer is fairly obscure, but I can think of at least one friend who’s sworn off the likes of Last.fm for fear of becoming addicted to checking its personal charts (a minor, but common malady that I’m sure many battle against), who might be interested to give this a go. Probably my favourite option is the Wallpaper Generator which creates a downloadable JPG according to a variety of criteria (resolution, source, colour, sorting, etc.) for placing on your desktop or similar. Here’s one I made earlier:

Link: Internet iTunes Registry

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A new iTunes update (7.1) out today enables full screen display of iTunes - pictured above - I’m a happy man! This reinstates the full-screen functionality available via the original third party application bought up by Apple and implemented in iTunes. I did wonder whether they’d ever provide this because of the availability of FrontRow. Now if only they’d get round to providing:

• A funky way of accessing all the music metadata that people like me used to pore over on album and CD covers - performers, date of recording, thanks to all and sundry, lyrics, links to web-based information, even liner notes - all while listening to iTunes
• Ability to flip the album cover over to see the back and even inside covers
• More and better visualizers

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Avvenue allows anyone to access their iTunes library anywhere as long as they store their music on a PC and leave it awake and on:

The Avvenu Music Player™ lets you remotely listen to music you have stored (”ripped”) on your Windows® PC. Simply install the Avvenu Music Player and you can listen to your music using the web browser on any other Internet-connected Windows or Macintosh® personal computer, laptop, or Windows Mobile® 5 Smartphone.

This can be done via mobile phones as simply as via a remote computer. It’s an attractive concept, though I wonder a) what this would do to your phone bill and b) to global warming, it being one more reason to leave your PC on rather than turn it off. Rather attractively, it’s free to download.

(If memory serves, this used to be possible on a Mac, but I may be wrong.)

Link: Avvenu product page
Via: TechCrunch

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One of the “hidden” features in iTunes 4.7 is the ability to managed and organize PDF files.

Useful article by Kirk McElhearn on how to store and organise PDFs in iTunes.

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• I wondered why development of Coverflow had ceased as it was such a promising app, now I know.
• As can be seen above, the single album view is rather tasty - now if only you could flick to see the back + view the lyrics (potentially) embedded in each mp3 file + view player/production/liner notes - maybe in another five years…
• Browsing albums in coverflow mode is giving me mucho spinning beachballs (on MacBook Pro) and I’ve not immediately got the hang of it - most albums seem not to have graphics, much of my music’s a bit obscure so the auto iTunes loading of graphics is useless for me. The browser view, which I’ve come to rely upon doesn’t appear to interact usefully with the graphic mode (shown in the lower of the two screenshots above), but maybe this is something I’ll understand with a bit more use.
• Given the attractiveness of the coverflow option, it’s weird that the ’show artwork’ window is still available.
• The movie and tv stuff passes me by entirely (and will continue to do so until I can get high-def downloads of Alain Resnais and Wim Wenders films not on DVD), so I won’t be so bold as to comment.
• GUI - yikes, gone are the aqua scrollbars, in their place dull grey affairs with vague gradients. Sign of things to come I guess, but for me they’ve gone too far in the direction of making the interface plain - pendulum swing away from the original aqua garishness. Transport buttons, likewise, are rather uninteresting now.
• All in all, mixed feelings, will post more when I’ve had a bit more time with it.

[Originally published on A Personal Miscellany]

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