iTunes 8¶
1716 words on iTunes
The new iPod models announced today obviously require an update to my music player. And for a change Apple used the opportunity to bump iTunes’ version number all the way up to 8 and to ship a few more significant changes inside the update. Yet - as with most other iTunes updates of the past years, those changes don’t seem particularly well thought out or implemented.
First Impressions
To begin with I had to chuckle at the Read Me file on the iTunes disk image (presented in Apple’s notoriously bad style as an application with a document icon because that seems to be their ‘solution’ for giving people localised file names). The text in the file blathered about iTunes being the best application to enjoy your media and put them on your iPod, iPhone or -TV. Last time I checked it also happened to be the only way to do that, which makes that distinction rather pointless.
It appears that iTunes 8 requires MacOS X.4 to run. Things are starting to be more ‘modern’, I suppose. Backwards compatbility - even to themselves - has never been a strength of Apple but I do wonder whether this could be better if Apple’s iPod imperium weren’t so tightly hooked up with iTunes.Grid
iTunes’ display modes have bee shuffled around a bit. There is an ‘all new’ grid mode now which displays cover art in a grid. Just as Exposé is more useful than the Exposé rip-off Microsoft shipped with Vista, this looks much more useful than Cover Flow to me. The latter is pretty but it’s just not particularly good at displaying the cover art in a useful way.
While the idea seems all right, we’ll have to see how good the implementation is. As things with many images go, particularly performance is something one wonders about. The performance characteristics of iPhoto suck and iTunes shouldn’t try to copy them. In a first run, RAM consumption was obscene iTunes 8, your 300MB music player. Subsequently the numbers didn’t go as high, but they still seemed non-trivial.
Assuming that Moore’s Law or something will solve the performance problems over time, the actual implementation can be wondered about. To me it looks messy. There’s a new scroll bar style, there are mode switching ‘tabs’ at the top of the grid view the interaction of which with the search field feels odd. Those ‘tabs’ have yet a different colour, and there’s a size slider at the top (which actually makes sense space-wise, but is inconsistent with Apple’s other apps and their usual consistency-trumps-spacesaving motto as seen in X.5 iCal).
So far I found the ‘Album’ tab in this view mode mostly useless, mainly because having several non-album songs by the same artist creates a separate entry for each of them in the list rather than using a single ‘Unknown Album’ entry. That just litters things considerably.
The ‘Artist’ tab seems to be the most useful one as it consolidates all albums by the same artist, thus reducing clutter while still giving a visual clue thanks to cover art. Until you reach the bottom of the list, that is. There you’ll find loads of separate items without ‘Artist’ information. But at least that’s fairly easy to ignore at the end of the list.
The ‘Genre’ tab seems mostly useless. Not only does it feature hideously generic and non-localised default images for the few ‘official’ genres, as a person who tends to use broad genres (just as the ‘official’ genres iTunes and IMDB ‘support’ are rather broad - and idiosyncratic) I also doubt it will actually help browsing my music.
The final tab is for the ‘Composer’. I still have to figure out what to make of it. On the one hand, this may be a good first step of iTunes towards acknowledging the existence of ‘Classical’ music and helping organise that. On the other hand - the resulting list wasn’t too useful for me. Particularly because some of my pop music contains composer information as well (for cover versions, for non-self composed stuff and because it appeared fashionable to just duplicate the artist information to the composer field at some stage). Now one actually needs to think about how that field is filled.
As the grid view and the composer list apparently can’t be combined with the classical genre and album browser at the top to make the GUI even more inconsistent ‘interesting’, one cannot browse composers for music filed as ‘Classical’ only without creating a dedicated smart playlist for the purpose, I find this a bit underwhelming.
And my underwhelmedness continues when no that iTunes 8’s ‘Artist’ and ‘Composer’ fields still consists of a single value only. And thus one ends up having an Artist ‘Arcade Fire and David Bowie’ when one really wants the songs in question filed with ‘Arcade Fire’ and ‘David Bowie’. The same is even more necessary for ‘Composer’ information in pop music. As often several people are given as the ‘Composer’ the list would be both less cluttered with distinct entries and occurrences of the same person in different composer teams merged together. Currently, this isn’t too useful.
List with Cover Art
To keep things a little clean, iTunes didn’t introduce the new grid view as a fourth view mode. Instead the previous Cover Art List mode was merged with the normal list mode. This is a neat simplification. But it seems a little half-assed as well. Not only because a new control is introduced to make this work. But also because I find its behaviour a bit unpredictable. Say you have a nice album listing for an artist like this one:
Here you have a numbered list of songs. Hiding the cover art by clicking the arrow pointing to the left in the table header also hides the numbers, which can be a bit irritating as Apple decided to turn off the track number column by default when you enter a song list from grid mode.
… and once you’re in that situation try changing the sort order of the list. You’ll find that the clickable area of the ‘Show Cover Art’ button reaches further to the right than you may expect.
A final thing that downright disappoints me about the Cover Art List is that the hiding and unhiding of the cover art column isn’t smoothly animated. I totally expected that.
Info window
iTunes batch editing info window got a facelift in this update as well. As the settings one could make for songs increased over time, the multi-item info window only picked up a few of those. Now all options can be set from the new and tabbed info window. That should make a few scripts superfluous.
Genius
With Apple’s tendency to label anything capable of unassisted breathing ‘Genius’, iTunes now comes with a Genius as well. It clutters the application with another ugly sidebar and the application’s sidebar with another item (I guess I’ll save us some time and not ridicule the silly sidebar subdivisions which make the ‘Genius’ item appear as a playlist even though it seems to be part of the ‘STORE’)
I didn’t try the actual ‘Genius’ stuff out as I doubt it will be interesting and I’ll let others fill Apple’s databases first. My guess is it simply sends all my library information to Apple, runs some statistics and then returns information about music which I can buy with Apple. No idea what’s ‘Genius’ about that but apparently Mr Jobs is thrilled by it. Even Apple’s ‘More Info’ page on the topic is suspiciously void of information and full of ‘great’ statements. Why don’t they clearly state what they are doing and transferring.
Genius users: How good is it? Does it anything that’s actually interesting? How does it compare to amazon’s or last.fm’s recommendations?
Uh, and probably the Geniuses were so busy selling music that they didn’t have time to fully localise their own sidebar…
Other
I am sure there are many more things to observe and comment. The ones I noticed were those which - just like in previous iTunes updates - look like ad-hoc UI changes that could have done with more care.
- To me it looks like they decreased the font size of the song count / playlist duration at the bottom of the window.
- Before they had to put ‘Genius’ and ‘Show right sidebar’ buttons at the bottom right of the window, the much morre useful list to show/hide the genre/artist/album browser used to be there.
- Still loads of modal windows
- Still completely sucky multithreading. Removing three titles from the library should take a split second even while iTunes is ripping a CD.
- Why can’t I rip two CDs at the same time?
- The ‘Controls’ menu now contains submenus for the repeat and shuffle modes just in case things were too obvious before.
- The items in the ‘View’ menu change depending on the mode one is in.
- An additional item you get there while in Grid mode is the option of ‘Group’ing albums. I’m not sure that’s easier to use but it looks more organised.
- The Subtitles menu remains completely inactive at most times.
- Icon for iTunes Database files, two new files using it next to the iTunes database.
- New Visualiser, hit ‘?’ to see its help
- Preferences have been cleaned up and rearranged. In particular there is no three-tabbed item in them anymore. I’m not sure this makes sense everywhere though (e.g. is the Library name used anywhere but in ‘Sharing’ these days? Is CD burning really better if you display a modal dialogue before starting it?)
- As part of the cleanup, the option to hide the genre column in the browser vanished, which quite a few people find unreasonable - but there’s a hidden preference. The option to hide iTMS links seems to have vanished as well.
- There are many localisation tweaks (for German anyway). For example, the terminology for Shared (‘SHARED’) music has been changed to the more technocratic / Windowsoid and shorter ‘Freigaben’ that Apple also use in the Finder these days from the more classic and humane ‘Gemeinsam genutzt’.
- The iTunes GUI now supports is now accessibility technologies. That’d be as good as overdue. Let’s hear what people using assistive technologies have to say about that.
