On iTunes sharing, and missing features

As you can probably tell from my previous post, Apple's iPod event has meant this evening has devolved into kicking the tyres of the latest release of iTunes. As usual, there are shiny new features. Unfortunately, as usual, there's also a problem with me testing them.

Most of my music is on an external hard drive, and usually that's shared through the house from either a Linux box. I also tend to install things like iTunes on a machine where I use it less, in case I want to back out the upgrade (as I feared I might before I started grepping strings for defaults hacks). Combining these means I rarely get to look at features on a local library, but instead use the iTunes shared library facility. Tonight, that's worked out fine for some of the new features, like the bundling of Magnetosphere (which is lovely to see).

However, it's utterly failed me on three of the others. Genius playlists and store recommendations are completely disabled for shared libraries. I can see why playlists might have to be lost - should the recommendations be drawn from the local or the remote machine? - but the store stuff? Surely that's doable too? Even more annoyingly, Apple still don't allow you to use any album artwork features (grid view, or the reworked album view (check out View > Show Artwork Column) remotely except for the artwork of the currently playing track.

As Tom Insam notes, this is particularly galling because Apple's iPod touch / iPhone Remote does show album cover thumbnails, at least, showing that somewhere in the guts of one of Apple's remote music protocols (and I suspect there is actually only one) the ability to work with artwork is there. However, I'm not holding my breath. Apple don't seem to care about the fact that iTunes supports a genuinely useful method of sharing music, and so it'll quietly wither as the user experience for a shared library continues to pale next to that of locally stored music.