2 posts tagged “daap”

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.

Since the introduction of the iPod touch a couple of weeks ago, there's been a lot of commentary, understandably. A lot has touched on what the differences in functionality between the iPhone and the Touch, since they're obviously very similar products. However, I'm also interested in something that neither of them do: iTunes shared library access.

Since iTunes 4, it's been easy to listen to music from another copy of iTunes over a network (although Apple have steadily reduced the usefulness of the implementation, and it's no longer a bullet point feature, just the subject of a how to document). Nonetheless, given iTunes dominance as a music library manager, it's still popular.

Now, I can understand why the users of the iPhone - intended more as a roving device, perhaps, then the iPod touch - didn't miss this feature. The Touch, though, seems ideally suited to it, either when it's docked to speakers elsewhere, or for routing sound between a server and remote speakers, and the hardware needed to support it is certainly all there, with the wifi and good interface that both devices have. However, there's no sign at all that Apple care, instead deciding that it's more important to build a Wi-Fi music store and a gimmicky tie-in to a coffee chain, leaving the market to the likes of Sonos.

Given the continued lack of an open implementation that will connect to iTunes 7, due to Apple's encryption of the library sharing protocol, it's not even possible for a third party to build a generally useful version. (Believe me, if there was, I'd be far keener to buy an iPod touch. Ironically, I know a few people who are more interested in it as a development platform than as a music player; Cover Flow just isn't that interesting to most, it seems.)

I'm not the first person to mention this lack - Kevin Marks has a similar lament - but I wonder if there's something more going on. After all, the AirPort Express hasn't been updated to 802.11n (although arguably that's due to issues shrinking the hardware sufficiently, rather than lack of will), while Apple's lead in easy sharing and connection seems to be eroding, as uPNP sharing gains a foothold (after all, Microsoft must expect some return on all those Xbox 360s), and iTunes sharing still only has one licencee, Roku. I'm sad to say I was surprised to find that Front Row supported shared libraries; I was assuming that Apple wouldn't care.

There's also a lack of development on the underlying protocol that worries me. iTunes sharing explicitly doesn't support wide-area Bonjour, which seems to me to provide a theoretical mechanism for streaming from your own library to an iPhone on the move. Cover art isn't well supported by the protocol either (which is especially annoying now that Cover Flow is such a prominent feature). While I know that it can chew up a lot of bandwidth, I'm running a large library over file sharing - just the sort of thing iTunes is meant to save you messing with - and the cover art works fine, although admittedly the local cache is quite large and transferring it may be problematic.

My dismay is more acute because this a problem that's worth solving. At dConstruct last week, Peter Merholz quoted Steve Jobs on experience design; someone builds a prototype, then makes it a product. The third step, and the one most people fail to take, is making it really nice. Apple may consider iTunes sharing to be nice enough, but I see its possibilities for truly handling home audio from one server through multiple clients to many listening devices, and shake my head. Things don't seem to have improved in the three years since Chris Heathcote was rolling his own glue to handle music listening.