7 posts tagged “itunes”

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.

Another September, another iTunes release. This doesn't really feel like one that entirely requires a major version, but with the last release already up to point seven, I suppose it's not a big shock.

The preferences window has seen a bit of an overhaul, which is probably a good thing, as it was getting horribly unwieldy. (I'm hoping that Sven-S. Porst will provide his usual exhaustive review in a day or three.) However, it's also lost one of my pet choices, namely the ability to switch off the genre browser. (That's the thing that comes up when you hit Command B. Once upon a time, it even had a button in the toolbar, but that's years ago now.)

Thankfully, there's still a hidden preference. Just open a new Terminal window and type the following:

defaults write com.apple.itunes show-genre-when-browsing  -bool FALSE

Lo and behold, your browser window is usefully wide again, and those nonsense genres are banished from your sight.

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?

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.

Thanks to all the people who dropped by after the link from John Gruber, and indeed to him for (evidently) leading people here. Hopefully it's been useful. I appreciate all the comments, on vox and off. I hadn't really thought about the implications of posting an article like that on a site that requires the creation of a login, and of course these days it's not exactly a great idea to leave your email address lying around, so bonus points to those of you who managed to evade my (rather bad) spam filtering.

Some specific comments, then. Thanks to Rod Begbie for his comments about MusicBrainz, which has apparently supported sort data for a while, and Todd Larason for his dissection of  ID3 tags that iTunes uses. I also updated the article to clarify how to apply fields to multiple items after an email from Chris Brummel made me realise that they weren't quite clear enough.

Speaking of applying fields to multiple tracks, Jacob Rus sent through an AppleScript that allows you to select a batch of tracks and apply a "Sort Artist" to each of them. It's worth reading the commentary at the beginning, as it's a little fragile (as scripts that rely on orders often are), but it also looks to be a useful fix for some of the UI issues noted in my original piece.

One of the key new features in iTunes 7.1, which came out earlier this week, is "enhanced sort options". What does that mean? Why would you want such a thing? How do you use them? I'm here to answer all of these questions. Hopefully.

Before iTunes 7.1

Since at least iTunes 5, there's been automatic discarding of stopwords (for example, "the" and "a") at the beginning of group and album names. This means that The Beatles are found under B, not T. However, John Lennon still appears under J, because iTunes didn't do automatic name reversal.

(Of course, there are good technical reasons for this. Take "The Beatles", "Tori Amos" and "Carter USM" and tell me what order they come in. Naively you'd have "Carter USM, The Beatles, Tori Amos", and iTunes manages "The Beatles, Carter USM, Tori Amos", but a record store would be able to use human ingeniuity to list them as "Tori Amos, The Beatles, Carter USM". If you can codify rules for distinguishing Carter USM and Tori Amos, though, I'll be amazed.)

Some people modified their MP3s to have tags that put the names the other way around, just for sorting, but most of us just dealt with it as best we could and remembered to hit T for Tori Amos, even if we'd rather have looked in A.

One slightly odd implementation detail of this feature was that users whose iTunes interface was in languages other than English had their own list of stopwords, so for German users The Beatles were indeed sorted to T. Sven-S. Porst provided a small patch to correct this, but there was no official way to fix it, any more than there was a way to make John Lennon nestle amongst the Ls.

Apple obviously started caring about this, because iTunes 7 introduced a new sorting option, although it's far from obvious where to find it. If you click on any field heading in the main iTunes track list, the library is sorted by the desired field. However, if you click on Album repeatedly, you get "Album by Artist", which sorts by artist first, then by album, then "Album by Year", which is similar except the year of the album is taken into account (so you can play through a band's career in chronological order.)

One consequence of this change is that to modify the sort ordering (from A-Z to Z-A, or chronological to reverse chronological), you now have to click on the arrow. Previously, you could use any part of the header, but the introduction of the sorting options discussed above made that impractical.

New in iTunes 7.1

iTunes 7.1 sees an overhaul of sorting. The easiest way to see this in action is to go to View > View Options (also available by using Command J) where you'll see a series of fields prefixed "Sort". Enable one (I suggest Sort Artist) and it will appear in the main library window, but you'll notice the contents are grey. Despite this, the contents are editable. Even if you've never used the feature before, you'll see a few fields filled in; these are the previously-implicit sort options discussed above. You can sort by the Sort Artist field, although this is a bit silly, as it's exactly the same as sorting by the Artist field- after all, that's the point. I imagine you'll want to switch the field off again, though, as it takes up a lot of space without telling you anything useful.

If, as I suggest, you don't use a column to show the sort ordering, how can you edit it? The easiest way to do so is to select a single track and open the Get Info window (command I). There's a new panel in this window, halfway along, called Sort Options. In this window you can customise the details of not only the album and artist name, but also the song name, and other fields. So if you want to move John Lennon from J to L, put "Lennon, John" in the Sort Artist track.

Apply Sort Field Dialog

Astute readers will have realised this only applies to the track they've selected, and possibly leapt ahead and tried selecting multiple tracks and opening Get Info once more. Here we hit a snag- this dialog doesn't show any sort fields. How, then, do you fix up all those tracks? It's far from obvious, but there's a menu option: Advanced > Apply Sort Field (also available in the context menu). Select a track for which you've already mofidied a sort field, then select this option, and you'll see one of the least clear dialog boxes I've seen recently.

What it's really asking is "Do you want to change the sort artist of all tracks by 'John Lennon' to 'Lennon, John'?". You probably want to both say Yes to this, and to check the "Don't ask me again" box for good measure.

Custom sort data is written to MP3 files; for example, the Sort Artist is in the ID3v2.3 field TSOP. However, the initial (implicit) sort data (such as "The Beatles", mentioned earlier) isn't encoded into tags. (Thanks to Sven-S. Porst for the correction.)

As a final side note, I'll mention that the new "Album by Artist/Year" option noted above didn't work over iTunes Library Sharing in versions of iTunes, until the release of 7.1, so it's nice that that's fixed.

In conclusion: is it any good?

Sort field customisation is a really powerful feature, but Apple's implementaton is pretty annoying. I'd rather not have had the option to view sort fields in the library, and instead get a more sensible way of applying sort fields to multiple tracks, either by a second pane in the multiple track Get Info window, or an automatic "You've changed John Lennon; do you want to apply this to all John Lennon tracks?" dialog.

Apple's documentation of this feature is also nearly non-existent. There's a single page in the Help Book for iTunes on sorting, and while it says "For example, you could set up iTunes to sort songs by an artist's last name instead of the first", it gives you no idea on how to manage this. Let's face it, people don't write blog entries like this for obvious features.

On the other hand, as far as I know, no other major music library manager application has attempted to solve this problem before, and the underlying infrastructure is fairly sound. I just hope that there's a chance to apply a little UI polish in the future.

(Thanks to Tom Insam for poking at a copy of iTunes while I was at work and Sven-S. Porst for his post on iTunes 7.1 which prompted me to make more of a how to guide.)

Bandwagon is a new service that promises to back up your iTunes music remotely, which sounds nice and handy. I priced using Amazon S3 to do the same recently on the spool, and it comes out to over $10 a month, so it'll be interesting to see how Bandwagon sets its prices, and how easy to use the software is. Mind you, by writing this post, I should be able to get the service free for a year, which I expect will give me more to write about.