iPod touch and Remote Streaming

One of the reasons I bought an iPod touch in November, as opposed to a cheaper, vaster iPod classic that I could use to store all of my music, was that it held out the promise of being an interesting device to fit into Apple's slowly-expanding range of devices that hang off iTunes. I don't just mean in the obvious "iTunes organises your music" sense, either, but by using iTunes library sharing and the music streaming that the AirPort Express enables.

It took months, and the release of the App Store, but one of Apple's two apps - and the only one that's free - is Remote. As Apple put it,

With Remote, you can control the music on your computer or Apple TV from your iPod touch or iPhone. Play, pause, skip, shuffle. See your songs, playlists, and album art on your iPod touch or iPhone as if you were right in front of your computer.

Better writers than me have outlined some of the ways that Remote actually improves on the user interface of "Mobile iTunes", the native interface to the music stored on an iPod touch. (In short, it provides much more contextual information within the space provided.) However, I used it and saw three things that it could do, but doesn't, although I readily admit each might have issues that stand in the way of an implementation.

No Cover Flow

Mobile iTunes uses the iPod's orientation sensor to swap from a list view to the Cover Flow view, which lets you see lots of artwork and scroll through it. Remote doesn't do anything with the orientation sensor at all, and certainly doesn't use full-size artwork.

There are two explanations I can think of. The trivial is that Cover Flow might be getting out of favour in Cupertino, just like metal windows did before it. The more sensible is that the demands on a network - even a wireless network - of downloading all the images are too high. Heck, even when copying from the "disk", my iPod can't refresh the entire list at once. Nonetheless, a man can dream, and it would be nice if the app had some sort of horizontal mode.

No streaming

In an ideal world, I'd have speakers in every room, connected to an AirPort Express, and I'd be able to wander around the house with the same music playing out of every speaker. (Actually, ideally, something would know where I was and switch the speakers on and off as required, but let's stick with what we have, shall we?) However, I can't afford that many wireless routers, so instead I'd be quite happy to wear the iPod and listen to it instead. Apple don't let you do that, despite the fact that's how shared iTunes libraries work.

There is, once again, a possible technical reason for this. The iPod might not be up to decoding all the different formats in your iTunes library; in particular, Apple Lossless might be a problem. However, it can play local lossless files, and I can't see that shifting the data is that much harder. I'm hoping this shows up as an option in a new release.

Since I first thought about writing this, two things have happened. Firstly, the tech press noticed an Apple patent filing discussing the "Remote access of media items", which goes beyond the capabilities of shared libraries at present (as it mentions syncing metadata). Secondly, Simplify Media released their client for iPods with the 2.0 software. However, I'm unhappy about having to run a second application just to cater for the chance I'd like to stream. (Interestingly, a recent blog post notes issues with cover art and bandwidth, so there may be something to the technical issues after all.)

No shared libraries

This is the biggest problem for me personally, and it could be the easiest to fix. It's straightforward: there's no way to use Remote to connect to a shared library. There are reasons you'd want this: an office server that doesn't have music of its own, but instead which plays from lots of other people's machines, or perhaps a laptop which relies on an iMac as the source of a home's entire music. While you could argue that you should connect Remote to the server in the latter case, that's not going to work out if you're using mt-daapd, and it doesn't work in the first case either, since the music won't come out of the server's speakers.

This does of course raise a few issues with the user interface, but Steve Jobs employs some very smart people, and I'm sure there's a way to deal with it. So there's my wishlist for a future version. Shared libraries, streaming to the iPod, complete with a Cover Flow view. Sure, it's tricky, but then, don't fanboys always demand the near-impossible of Apple?