3 posts tagged “ipod”

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?

Over a million iPhones have been sold.  Have you: bought one, considered it, or decided it's not for you?

I'm still undecided on whether I'm interested in an iPhone or not. At the moment, my music player is still the second generation iPod, with 10GB of disk space, that I bought over five years ago, and while it's no longer exactly huge, I'm quite fond of its physical buttons, heft and shape. (Is it just me that finds new iPods to seem rather too thin?)

On the other hand, I've never really been taken with any of the phones I've owned since the T610, way back when. If I'd timed the upgrade to hit the K750 or N73 when they were new, it might have been a different story, but I didn't. I'm currently wavering between upgrading to a K850 - I hate cameras without rotation sensors, so that is a nice feature - or just going down to PAYG on the Nokia 6230 I'm still borrowing from candace.

Of course, the iPhone is a third option, but to be honest, I'm waiting for 3G (just like half of Europe, perhaps), and I'd love to see how useful the promised API is before I get one with the idea that I'd hack on it. I'm also not yet sure if there's room for a device like the iPhone, or iPod touch or N810, in my life. I'm on my laptop at home or desktop at work so much of the time, do I really need mobile data? I'm sure once I have it I'll find it impossible to do without, just as it's now inconceivable to be without a mobile phone at all, so maybe putting off that day is a good idea.

So, to answer the QotD: I'm considering the iPhone, but I'm good at procrastinating, so I haven't really decided either way yet.

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.