Ask HN: So, what's wrong with iTunes? (or what more would you want?) | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: So, what's wrong with iTunes? (or what more would you want?)

7 pointslut4rp35 comments

People have been talking for a long time about how iTunes is not a good music manager, when compared to say, AmaroK or foobar2000. We just don't need music players anymore, we have monstrously huge libraries that need a fast, slick manager. So here's what I'd want an opinion on...

1. What's wrong with iTunes? 2. What would you like to see in an OS X music "manager"/player? 3. What is your current favorite app for doing the above on OS X?

(I am not asking this for either Windows or Linux because I believe people are pretty satisfied with their options on both these systems (AmaroK, foobar2000, Exaile etc.)

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Support for classical music.

iTunes treats individual movements as "songs", not part of a complete piece of music. So, you can't, say, click on Dvorak's Piano Trio in F minor, you have to first create a temporary album to hold all three movements.

Also, the searching is messed up for classical music. The composer's name, for example, is sometimes under "artist", and sometimes in another column, and sometimes not there at all. A column for "composer" would fix that.

Those and a few other obvious and easy tune-ups would make iTunes usable for classical music.

There is a field for "Composer". You can add the column to any view though "View -> View Options (Cmd-J on a Mac)". The Grid view can also be sorted by composer.

Movements are often indicated by the "Grouping" column, or kept together my joining the tracks from a CD on import by selecting the tracks then "Advanced -> Join CD Tracks".

Sub-optimal, I know, but there isn't much more an application can do given the way CD metadata works.

You have that. There is a tag field for composer. You can add a column for composers by right clicking (option click, I assume) the column headers, then drag and drop into the correct order.

I expect classical music is probably always tagged badly, which is why the composer ends up in the artist field. Also, am I supposed to enter for Radiohead: Johnny Greenwood, Thom York, et al. or, just Radiohead? I tunes tagging ability is weak in some places. Also it doesn't help when you have a non-ipod and want to remove some songs and replace with others.

I pretty aggressively re-tag my classical collection, since AFAIK there's no online store or CD database which comes close to getting the information right on a consistent basis.

So, for example, right now I'm listening to the first movement of Dvořák's cello concerto; I've tagged the track as follows:

http://static.b-list.org/files/itunes-classical-metadata.png

When I bought the CD years ago, of course, CDDB filled in the "artist" as "Antonin Dvorak".

Keeping all the metadata correct has been a royal pain, but worth it in terms of being able to quickly find things and generate playlists keying off things like the composer field.

As an aside, I notice that Amazon's MP3 download page for the above recording does actually seem to display the right data for at least some fields -- I don't plan to buy it again to find out whether they got the whole thing right, though. And sometimes iTunes gets the "grouping" field right for multi-movement works, though not with enough frequency to avoid the need for lots of manual re-tagging.

I think iTunes on the Mac is pretty decent (compared to the Windows version, at any rate. God, have you tried doing any heavy I/O stuff in iTunes for Windows?).

I'd love the ability to have nested queries in Smart Playlists. The only "solution" at the moment involves having folders full of Smart Playlists for individual queries and then having another Smart Playlist to assemble that "level" of the query.

I'd also like the Genius Recommendation feature to be a bit better. The Genius Playlist feature is pretty solid at the moment (when it came out in iTunes 8, I was pretty much blown away), but the recommendation stuff is still nowhere near as accurate as what it's actually trying to emulate -- asking an expert, "hey, if I like this music, what else would I like?"

Edit: Oh, and more album art in Apple's databases. The Gracenote stuff isn't exactly fantastic. I know there's TuneUp and stuff like that, but Apple boasts that it's a complete feature built in to iTunes, when really, it's not that comprehensive in my experience. Who knows, maybe I just listen to obscure music.

Genius is nowhere near as good as Pandora.

Agreed, Pandora is great!

It sucks to live outside the US. I could probably access Pandora through a proxy (I haven't tried), but it's a barrier, and even one complication makes a lot of people not do something (look at sites where you can comment anonymously versus sites that make you create an account just to comment on a story).

Genius and Pandora are quite different. They have some overlap in functionality, but at it's core Genius is about the music you already know and have. It's more about solving the paradox of choice that occurs when you have a large music library than it is a recommendation and discovery engine.

Actually, Genius doesn't recognize most of the music I have, and Pandora can set up stations with long lists of artists and songs.

My library is large and varied enough I no longer use either. But I preferred Pandora.

It's dog slow for huge libraries, and doesn't watch directories for added/removed files.

musicbrainz support would be nice

Watch directories is the big one.

Virtually every other music manager supports watch directories. Its omission from iTunes isn't due to them overlooking the feature. Rather, it's a coercive measure to try and push users towards acquiring all their new music through the iTunes Music Store.

It becomes the "path of least resistance" when you intentionally omit features to make all other paths harder.

That's quite a theory. Wouldn't one expect to find other instances of such coercive omission? And yet, double-clicking a file in the Finder or Explorer still opens it in iTunes, which by default copies the track into your library. Ripping CDs still works the same. Drag and drop still works the same.

No, I think it has more to do with watch folders not being a feature in high demand than any conspiratorial nonsense.

If watch folders are very important to you you might look at Hazel (http://www.noodlesoft.com/hazel.php), which is like a more tolerable implementation of Folder Actions. It has a "Import into iTunes" action built in, and can be set to recurse subfolders. If iTunes is set to copy files on import, Hazel can be told to trash the original.

I wouldn't recommend it for just that, but even if it doesn't strike your fancy--after the trial expires, it still works on one folder with two rules (e.g. Add to iTunes & Move to Trash), so it doesn't really cost anything if that's all you use it for.

I'm not excusing the lack of a similar feature in iTunes, but that's what I use and I'm happy with it.

Single biggest flaw, as far as I'm concerned, is the inability to script the folder hierarchy. If I want All albums folders to be prepended by the release year I should be able to do that.

Edit: Also, sometimes I have correctly named mp3's, but I haven't tagged them. Itunes gracefully renames my files to 'unknown' removing any trace to the correct name. And, if the files were in a folder prepended with the album year iTunes will kindly create a new folder to hold the files to leave the album art in the original folder. (okay, that last one is Windows only)

I know you didn't ask about Windows users, but assuming you are from Apple and have an ear there, please forward this message to the appropriate individual...

With my fairly large, multi-gigabyte library, iTunes often takes minutes to respond to user input. Sometimes during syncing it can take up to 30 minutes to respond to my input. Please performance-profile iTunes before frustrated and contractually-obligated-to-use-iTunes iPhone users slap you with a class-action lawsuit.

I haven't experienced this and my library is around 100 GB. Could it be something with your disk? Is the library on a local disk or remote disk? What's the speed (rpm) of the disk?

External (not remote) hard drive, 7200 RPM. Haven't had any problems using other programs with it.

1. The biggest problem I say is its entirely closed nature. I don't mean simply closed source -- I've used tools such as Mediamonkey for Windows and have been relatively satisfied -- but entirely closed to plugins or user developed support. Specifically I refer to the inability to use/add anything to use FLAC, lyrics search, grabbing high quality album art ( a la allcdcovers.com ), social integration (mixtape, last.fm), 3rd party hardware syncing, and library visualization. Each of these could be solvable if only Apple allowed some sort of plugin integration

2. See suggestions above

3. Not using mac.

Better support for another MP3 players/mobile devices? Right now, if I use iTunes, I need to use an iPod or iPhone as my MP3 player. Other companies (e.g. Palm) that have tried to use iTunes to manage music have been shut down by Apple.

Missing Sync lets me use my Blackberry with my iTunes library. I assume Palm works as well.

There is a lot that could be done regarding library management: It should be a lot faster, support bulk operations a lot better and implement fragmented libraries.

What I mean by that is that I use a MacBook with a 240GB hard disk for media stuff. I'd like to have a part of my library on the macbook (including stuff I listen to regularly, podcasts etc.) and a second part (my lib is around 200G) on an external HDD or AFP mount. At the moment I can only do that if I don't have iTunes manage my lib and then, still, the handling of missing files isn't too great.

IMO they should also get serious about supporting movies (as in: .avi, .mkv) - I'd love to use iTunes for that and helper apps demonstrate how much can be done here (epg guides etc.). Again, that'd require splitting my lib over various USB and AFP drives.

I really think there is demand for a well-made iTunes clone on the Mac, as long as it avoid feature creep: player software should manage and play music, I'll take care of getting it - keep your BitTorrent portal stuff to yourself, thank you.

I really like iTunes (on Windows) and don't know how it could be made better. It's perfect for the way I want to browse/listen to music. Am I alone in this?

I have problems with iTunes for Windows because the QuickTime platform isn't the native way to handle media on a Windows box (which it is in OS X). So already you're dealing with a beast that's more complicated than it should be.

That said, I use iTunes on my Windows PC. It's not great for large libraries or doing heavy I/O stuff (changing meta-data for multiple long movies, for instance), but it gets the job done and it's a pretty seamless experience between the music player, the store and the iPod/iPhone.

It's good, but in my opinion it needs a lot of work making it more responsive and efficient

I like itunes, my main issue to date is that it is godawful slow. Which is why I switched to songbird, which is still pretty slow, but not as slow.

Better video/media files support. It's such as hassle ripping my tv show or movies DVDs and getting it work with iTunes. The meta tags they do for tv seasons or movies don't even work that well. For example, trying to setup a 1 gig file with a movie poster always crashes iTunes for me and my tv shows can only be organized alphabetically.

I use Amarok for my music needs. The feature I enjoy most is the Now Playing playlist in a split window with my music library. I can add whole playlists, whole albums, whole discographies, or just individual songs.

Another feature I would like to see is some sort of network control... I am frequently on the couch with my laptop, and my desktop is playing music. Or my roommate wants to queue up a song. What I finally did was use Amarok and VNC (with a java web client) to let anyone log in and update the playlist...)

It's absurd that I can't search in both podcasts and my normal music library with one search field. I have a number of podcasts from live shows (like NPR's "Live Concerts From All Songs Considered"), and if I look up an artist ("Neko Case"), I'll only get tracks from within the "Podcasts" or "Music" folder (depending on which one I'm currently in). I can't see any reason why search shouldn't offer a global search of iTunes folders.

Music library is too locked to a single device.

If I put podcasts and music on my iPod with Rhythmbox from my work PC, iTunes will happily eradicate everything it doesn't know about as soon as I plug it in when I get home.

If I plug in my iPod while someone else is logged into my mac, iTunes immediately asks if it can wipe my iPod.

Maybe this protects the interests of the record industry, it sure isn't useful in any way to the end user.

Anyone remember when you could share your library on iTunes with anyone, not just on your local network. Yeah, I'd like that back...

iTunes on windows, perfect? When I click on a link to something on iTunes, it opens up another browser window and then opens up iTunes and leaves that orphaned browser window sitting around. Seriously, is that the best they can do?

Wrong with iTunes: Slowness, Storage of metadata in proprietary format, Easier to detect/remove dupes.

What I want? Something as fast and responsive as the original versions of winamp, with the search, playlist, podcast and sync functionality of iTunes.

It's single threaded. All my music is hosted on my NAS, which I connect to via wireless. iTunes fairly regularly freezes up for 15 seconds when I switch between playlists, or while it's attempting to add music to my library.

The most important thing you can add is the ability to sink between two computers, so I can sink my iphone to my work computer, and my home computer.

leave the sink out of this!

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