Icons

The icons in iTunes’ source list have been refreshed. While they were sufficiently colour coded before, it’s easier to recognise their details now. I suppose that qualifies as a helpful detail.

Looking at the list also highlights that one of the classic shortcomings of iTunes, a shortcoming which Apple happily adopted in many of their other applications as well, remains: I - and likewise you - cannot rearrange playlists in the way I want them. Rather iTunes sorts them by ‘type’ (folder, smart playlist, normal playlist) first and name then. The consequence are names beginning with dots or alephs to get the correct ordering. MS-DOS called from the 1980s and wants its inanity back.

Browser

I wasn’t particularly unhappy with iTunes’s classical three column browser for Genres, Artists and Albums. But with more and more music making it into my iTunes library over the years (remember the days when hard drive size was the limit for that?) that list became less and less useful, just as I think the scroll wheel iPods become quite hard to use once you fill the 40GB model. The problem there being that you’d usually want to keep the browser quite small so you can see plenty of songs as well, resulting to a lot of scrolling in the browser which is very inaccurate because even a tiny mouse movement can go past many artists.

iTunes 9 tries something new here and introduces the “Column Browser” submenu to the “View” menu which lets you use a vertical pane (or several) extending over the full width of the iTunes window to the side rather than above of the song list. While this looks a bit unexpected at first (and perhaps the highlighting and frames could be a bit better/clearer), it does make sense to me. Not only does it accept that iTunes is running wide screen world where vertical screen space is precious, it also makes navigation easier.

Time will have to tell whether this really improves usability, but I’m definitely going to give a single artist column a try.

A good collateral effect of this is that the new customisability of the Browser lets you choose which columns you want to see. The set of columns for the ‘Left’ and ‘Top’ modes differs and unfortunately it seems that columns cannot be rearranged. But this is a first step towards making classical music browsable in iTunes because it will now let you browse by Composer and quickly show you all recordings you have of Bach’s Cello Suites or so. Strangely iTunes doesn’t have a ‘Sort’ field for the ‘Grouping’ of a piece yet, so ‘Das Wohltemperierte Klavier’ cannot be sorted in the ‘W’ section of the alphabet where it should be, just as ‘The Beatles’ live among other ‘B’ artists.

The downside of course being that this highlights the lack, inconsistency and otherwise poor quality of the previously invisible metadata inside your files. It also makes you wonder why, by 2009, nobody made an effort to create sane metadata formats that can distinguish first and last names as well as several names per field and can handle the ‘complicated’ information that may be attached to a file (who composed? when? who played? orchestra? with soloists? with a choir? who conducted? where did the concert or recording take place? what’s the ‘number’ of the piece and in which numbering scheme? … and once I start being anal, I may also want different fields for the recording, mixing/mastering and release years [even if Apple doesn’t sell Beatles rereleases today]). Of course all this can be useful for pop music as well, but those types of metadata seem to be more common in classical music or jazz.

File Management

iTunes 9 also introduces a new opinion about the folders in which music should reside on your hard drive. Because of the dozens of strange things the music player manages today, Apple decided that a single folder in which band albums, audio books and podcasts are intermingled does not suffice but that separating those into a subfolder each is neater. That probably makes sense (even though I already sense too deep a nesting of folders when browsing iTunes media). Using the command for organising your library in the Library submenu of the File menu will let you reorganise your library accordingly.

Personally I am hesitant to use that command, though, as I also keep a backup of my music library in Time Machine and Time Machine is famous for being too dumb to recognise identical files after they have been moved. As a consequence, this seemingly ‘simple’ move would cause a massive backup-operation, unnecessarily filling the backup drive or even deleting old backups as a consequence. - The beauty of using an OS, a backup solution and a music player made by the same corporation that makes sure everything works together ‘just right’.

In my personal experience with Time Machine in the past, even manual workarounds for this problem like manually removing the Music folder from the backup before letting iTunes rearrange it, so you only have a single copy of it in backups, can be dangerous as well if you don’t have plenty of spare space on your backup volume. Time Machine does some sort of estimate of the space needed before starting a backup. This includes some mysterious ‘padding’ as seen in the console log. It will delete old backups until enough space for that overestimated number is available (without telling you, naturally) and only then begin the backup it wants to do. As I have often seen said ‘padding’ to be around a third of the actual backup size you can see how you easily run into trouble here when trying to back up a large media library where a third of hundreds of gigabytes quickly add up. Of course this is an idiotic bug, but it surely stopped my enthusiasm for letting Time Machine handle large backup tasks.

Home Sharing

Library Sharing was introduced in iTunes 4. It was a nice feature that was implemented with sufficient care for detail to allow live updates of the library status while a connection is already open and so on. Subsequently, Apple decided to put a lot of engineering resources into making it worse and worse because they considered getting in bed with the music industry more important than having a good feature. Hence, the protocol stopped working around the world, it stopped working with an arbitrary number of clients and it stopped having any hint of interoperability once iTunes insisted on encryption.

iTunes 9 brings a new variant of Library Sharing called Home Sharing which lets you set up a bunch of additional copies of itunes as yours and it ‘allows’ you more powerful access to those, offering (not outrightly refusing would be the more adequate word) to copy files back and forth. This may be an advance of the sorry state of previous versions, but ultimately it is lame and useless.

Setting up the feature starts the world of suck: it requires you to sign up both computers to iTMS. Now what the hell does iTMS have to do with my private home sharing? Why should I even ‘need’ an account there? Why should I need to ‘register’ with them. The ‘5 machines’ restriction imposed by iTMS is crap enough and now they even encourage people to sign up more machines than necessary for that.

I also fail to see how this is going to work once more than a single person (e.g. a family or a bunch of people living together) is involved. As soon as a few of them have have their own or no iTMS account, the whole illusion of effortlessly sharing across the home becomes a sick joke, another instance of lawyers and cash standing in the way of a good experience.

Actual problems I am seeing with iTunes Library Sharing and which I keep hearing about are very different anyway. A big one is that many people seem to like the idea of setting up a litte ‘home media’ thing with a big hard drive that stores all their music. It may also offer iTunes Library Sharing for convenient access. Once the Library is sufficiently large, simply loading it can take ages. Some cacheing strategy would have made the experience a lot better there.

Another feature that would be useful: being able to sync your iPod with music from a shared library without needing to copy it to your local one first. Same for burning CDs of course. And I could go on and on how a good media management software should really attempty to unify all the music on your network and present it for effortless playback everywhere. But iTunes’s implementation and Apple’s closed standards arrogance suggests that I need to find a different software first (which, due to Apple’s music player monopology on the Mac, means finding a new OS first).

General Look

The general look of iTunes 9’s windows has been revamped as well. It is a bit lighter than previous versions and comes with a lot of rather unsubtle ‘reflection’ effects. ‘Naturally’ iTunes’ windows keep looking different from other Mac windows. Not much so, but still noticeably. Would using a standard window be so friggin’ hard? One advantage of the new look is that is seems to include fewer long-stretched gradients which result in ugly dithering artifacts on my MacBook’s crappy display.

It seems like they managed to save some vertical space in the window’s header by leaving out the label of the search field and tightening the spacing in the display. They also ‘redesigned’ sliding elements, by letting the left and right side of the volume slider have different colours. I have no clue how that’s supposed to make the slider easier to understand or handle. Furthermore the light/dark scheme used there is the opposite of that used by the playback progress indicator right next to it.

A further change in general behaviour seems to be that iTunes now opens its cover art window if you happen to click on the cover art area in the main window when wanting to bring the main window to the front. Wrong and rather annoying if you ask me.

iTMS

The iTunes Music Store was shit before iTunes 9, and it still remains so. They made it look cleaner, more shiny, and more annoyingly animated now. They also tried to hide many parts of the UI by default requiring you to hover around a lot before redisplaying them. Playback controls for testing tracks seem awkward as well, the store handles an iTunes window of my preferred size even worse than the old one and menus inside the store seem to appear at inconsistent/random/useless locations. The shopping cart was renamed to Wishlist (pretty much impossible to find out) with the unpleasant side effect that you can only ‘buy now’ in this version. I dislike ‘buy now’ stuff, I like reconsideration. But apparently being pushy makes more money.

In general I think the whole approach of iTMS is horrible. It’s the same reason why I hate noisy supermarkets full of pointers to their offers. I am not coming to learn what the interns at iTMS, the coked up managers at music companies or the unwashed masses are excited about (mostly sluts it seems, with a few reiussues by dead bands thrown in). I usually come to use the search field. So a Google-style start page and no-nonsense search result pages would seem more useful to me.

iTMS still lacks standard controls, but they did refine them a bit with this release. Most notably the little horizontably scrollable lists of albums they display now seem to be loaded in one go and will scroll smoothly, even using the scroll wheel. A huge improvement over the previous behaviour.

Surely there’ll be MBAs telling me that this is ‘good’ behaviour because bending over for stupid people is a good way to earn money. And there’ll be lawyers telling me this is ‘absolutely required’ as you can’t show people ‘offensive’ words without prior warning. But the thing is that usually such ‘arguments’ solely serve to ‘protect’ corporations from the scorn of the clueless, the people who’ll cry ‘obscenity’ when seeing such suggestsions. And it comes from corporations wanting to give in to the demands of those people, thus making their software much more complex than it needs to be and not wanting to spend enough money to work the details out well enough to avoid such ridiculousness.

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.

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.

Now the iTunes 7.7.1 update came along and it hopefully fixes some bugs (whichever those might be - Apple software tends to be bug-free, I think) and also represents progress in the Mobile Me cockup department. Apple’s customers and shareholders can rejoice to see their money going to an intern changing all strings related to ‘push’ services in iTunes back to formulating things in terms of synchronisation. The internet will also giggle at the terabytes of data transfers necessitated by this crucial change.

iTunes 7.6 needs to ‘upgrade’ your music library and it seems that Apple got the hang of ‘doing the right thing’ here – making a backup of your old library first and then creating a new, updated one. With that safety net in place the upgrading worked just fine for me, of course.

Great innovations in this update of iTunes include support for German film ratings in the censorship preferences as well as a new icon for Booklets (apparently files whose names end in ‘.itb’). As things go with Apple these days, a booklet file icon isn’t recognised by something looking like a book on the icon itself but simply by by putting the letters ‘ITB’ on the standard iTunes files icon.

And I suppose there are changes for the iTunes store’s upcoming film renting amendments inside. Not being able to access these from Germany at this stage, I have to suppose that things basically work but not quite as smoothly as you’d want them to. The old problem of coding for lawyers rather than for users, I suppose.

Interestingly the – ever disabled – entries for ‘extended subtitles’ vanished from iTunes’ View menu. But a new ‘Audio & Subtitles’ submenu appeared in the menu to the left of it. I suppose the old items are hidden in there, but I couldn’t get that submenu active or open with the files in my library (even though submenu items are never supposed to be inactive if I’m not mistaken). This does lead to the hope, though, that Apple may take the previously neglected issue of multi-lingual soundtracks and subtitles for films more seriously at some point in the future. I won’t hold my breath, but at least iTunes knows about languages like ‘Central Khmer’ now for some elements of its subtitle UI now.

Also for the benefit of iTunes store changes, we find some strings about renting stuff in iTunes and the application seems to require at least QuickTime 7.1.3 (rather than 6.5.2) now according to Apple.

To top things of – for optimum Windows compatibility I presume – iTunes now comes with a ‘safe mode’ (invoked by holding the Command and Option keys while it launches). This disables visualisers:

Yeah, um, whatever.

Changes seem to include ‘support’ for Apple’s user-hostile ring tone scheme in non-English versions now. Leaving me with a ‘Klingeltöne’ item in iTunes source list when first launching the updated iTunes. And that although there is no such ring tone in my iTunes library, nor will there be one, nor has my iTunes ever encountered a device that could use them. Visual diarrhea.

More subtly, iTunes’ look changed yet again. Quite possibly to better fit in with MacOS X.5. The window texture has a different shade and apparently the coloured plus-minus-times buttons for controlling windows are a better match now. Furthermore, there are slight changes to selected button’s glow and there are distinct graphics for inactive buttons now. It’s not exactly an obvious change. Spot the difference below and tel me right away which half of the image is from iTunes 7.5:

Another extremely welcome improvement is that Apple finally implemented an improved editor for smart playlists. So far the editor was limited by the screen’s size, letting you only realistically edit as many criteria for the smart playlist as your screen could accomodate with the window just extending off the bottom of the screen once you had ‘too many’ criteria. This made creating and maintaining smart playlists with many conditions (e.g. to display songs of all bands playing at a festival) frustrating if not infeasible. But luckily iTunes’ engineers discovered scrollable views now and improved things considerably with that:

Of course this remains imperfect because the smart playlist editor is still a modal dialogue. But I can live with that as I don’t edit smart playlists all that often. However, it’s a bit more of a problem that Apple apparently failed to actually test their changed UI and its localisations once again. Quite obviously, in the screenshot above, the smart playlist is set to match all conditions, i.e. to only contain songs which satisfy the absurd condition of being by all those bands at once. Which was odd because I specifically created the playlist to contain all the bands listed, i.e. the songs matching any of the conditions. A quick test revealed that the popup menu doesn’t seem to be wired to the application at all. Useless.

Apart from that iTunes now seems to be signed now, presumably for some smoother action or updates in X.5 (although I’m not really sure which feature of iTunes would currently benefit from that). At least in the way Apple currently present this technology it has a certain promise of making applications less painful to update. For some strange reason I also had the updated iTunes skip once during playback – which at least for Mac OS X.4 I consider to be highly unusual. Let’s hope that was just a glitch of the system rather than a change in the application.

Other observations (added later on): iTunes now warns you if you are dropping tracks on a playlist that already exist in that playlist. It gives you the ability to skip the duplicate tracks which could be handy. • A change which I would have expected in the light of Mac OS X.5 and Time Machine is a change of the library format to split it into smaller files to reduce the space wasted by repeated backups of the iTunes library. After all, you’ll end up with hourly copies of that multi-dozen MB file hourly by only listenting to music curently.

A recent problem I ran into might directly hurt their business: The store seems to be buggy in a way that it didn’t let me add a certain piece of music to my shopping basket. What happened then? I tracked down their feedback form and had to categorise my problem using a popup menu that didn’t contain any applicable words. Finally I could enter my question and submit it.

I didn’t hear back from them for almost a week, not even receiving an automated confirmation that my request arrived. Then I received an apology for the late reply and was told that they could try deleting my shopping basked if I wanted that. That wasn’t the greatest thing as I quite like using the shopping basket to store things I find interesting and which might buy in the future. But if it solved the problem, so be it. Their reply even contained the obvious, yet helpful, recommendation to take a screenshot of the shopping basket so you can remember its contents later on. [Interestingly, this came with links telling you how to take a screenshot for Windows, Vista and Mac – in that order and using those names.] The presence of such a well prepared answer suggests that similar problems aren’t uncommon.

I replied immediately, asking them to delete my shopping basket and a mere six days later I received an answer telling me that they deleted my shopping basket now. So I tried putting the work in question into my empty shopping basket again a few days later and things just kept failing, the work didn’t appear there. What a bummer. Thus I was back to writing an e-mail, telling them about the continued problems and three days later I received another detailed reply. And that reply offered a ‘workaround’ for the problem, telling me to switch iTunes to use ‘1-Click’ shopping and get the piece in that way.

Which in turn I didn’t want to do because ‘1-Click’ feels creepy to me. I don’t want a single click between my careless finger and my money vanishing, I want as many security questions and password question as reasonably possible. I also want to be able to compare two recordings of the same work. The only convenient way to do that in iTMS with its slow and clumsy navigation is by putting both of them into the shopping cart. So, no sell for iTMS this was. Thanks to their software being buggy and their support being extremely slow. In a brick and mortar record store such problems wouldn’t arise or be solved in a minute. At amazon (when I last had a problem with them a few years back) the replies from customer support were within a day.

And then another problem happened: A friend sent me some album gift certificates. Which I can appreciate. It’s a really neat feature of iTMS. In theory anyway. Because my problem here was that I already own both of the albums (one of them even coming from iTMS). So, knowing that Apple are real bastards and won’t let you exchange pieces you already downloaded and fearing that iTunes will immediately start downloading the albums from the gift certificates after I clicked the link in the e-mail message, I avoided clicking those links (that’s the paranoia that e-commerce and DRM drives you into!) and looked for the place in iTMS for ‘returning’ such gift vouchers. I was pretty sure that after billions of sold and ‘gifted’ songs I wasn’t the first one running into this problem.

I didn’t find a link for such a return or exchange and hence I was back to the iTunes support form, explaining the problem and asking for instructions to solve it. It took a number of days (I think about a week, but Apple not sending confirmation mails for submitted questions and not putting the date next to my request in their answer makes this hard to figure out now) for them to get back to me. They sent me an e-mail carrying the subject ‘Re: Gift’ (which in German means poison), pointing me to their terms of service and telling me that such an exchange is not possible. It’s like not being able to return a shrink wrapped CD that hasn’t even been delivered yet. That’s just ridiculous. And it also means that giving friends anything other than gift vouchers of a certain value is a very bad idea on iTMS. Essentially my friend payed for gift vouchers which I have now. Both him and me have the gift vouchers’ albums already and, thanks, neither of us needs nor wants a second non-transferable copy.

This plainly sucks and it’s a complete rip off. Apple could turn the gift vouchers into store credit for me (which might be tricky due to their album pricing not being as ‘simple’ these days as it used to be) or they could simply refund my friend his money and invalidate the gift vouchers. That should be fairly easy.

Otherwise, if you have a German iTMS account and you are interested in Feist’s Let it Die album (iTMS price €6,99) or the Phil Ochs in Concert album (iTMS price €9,99), I have some spare gift vouchers…

It seems that today’s update of iTunes to version 7.4.2 limits itself to change the main binary, iPod updater binary, the mysterious iTunes.icxs file and all the version numbers they could find. My guess is that this is to iron out some problems in support for the new iPods, iPhones or whatever. It doesn’t appear to bring any conceptual improvements.

And in fact, this time the iTunes 7.4.1 update followed the 7.4 version so quickly that I didn’t really get to use the 7.4 version just because I was away for the weekend. Obviously, after Apple’s announcements last week, the update adds support for the new iPods (there’s a new file containing the iPod touch’s license agreement, plus the new icons of course) as well as for iPhone ringtones. There is a new icon for ringtones now which continues the recent (and IMO sad) trend in icon design where all icons are the same and just an abbreviation or acronym of the file type’s name is added to the file icon. While this icon exists, it appears that iTunes doesn’t actually advertise it to the OS, so I wonder a little what this is about. Other news for the icons is that their files have quadrupled in size, which should be considered a bit of future proofing iTunes for the large icon support in X.5 (making it the second application, after Coda, that I am aware of with such large icons).

Internally, iTunes also adds icons for the ringtones entry of the source list and there seems to be the capability to display the charging status as well – for all/some of the new iPods I presume. Which certainly is a nice touch. It also appears that the blue in the shuffle and repeat buttons has become a bit bluer. Still no graphite, though…

Further new graphics are the outlined stars which are used by iTunes’ new album rating feature. I am still a bit split about that feature. I generally think it is a good idea to consolidate single song ratings into averages for the whole album and to make this work both ways – such that you can rate both single songs and get an average for the whole album out of that, or rate the whole album without any of your existing individual song ratings being erased. All that seems to be reasonably well implemented.

On the other hand, this doesn’t fit in too well with my personal rating scheme. The vast majority of the songs in my iTunes library are unrated. And the way I use the ratings to indicate favourites by giving them four or five stars just doesn’t fit into this new scheme too well. Particularly as I don’t think that an outstanding album needs to contain outstanding songs only. Of course the good thing is that I don’t have to use the feature, so it isn’t a problem for me. What may be a more realistic problem even for people whose rating style matches Apple’s idea on this is the fact that the ‘implicit’ rating of a song as gained by a rating of its album will be used for smart playlists as well. Smart playlists should also be able to distinguish between ‘real’ (solid star) and ‘implicit’ (hollow star) ratings as otherwise it’s quite easy to ruin ‘★★★★’ or ‘★★★★★’ smart playlists because they’ll start containing all unrated songs from brilliant albums where you possibly only wanted to have a select few.

An interesting sidenote on this may be that iTunes does provide information about the type of rating via AppleScript. Which is good not only because the new feature is immediately exposed in this way but also because it’d make me hope that if this is possible, allowing a query of that field for smart playlists will not be unreasonably hard to implement either.

A change behind the scenes seems to be that this version of iTunes cleans up the localised lists of sort prefixes which were introduced in iTunes 7.3. These lists used to contain a number of duplicate entries as well as different forms of capitalisation (The, the, THE, for example). While that didn’t hurt anybody but the people creating these lists, it seemed a bit inelegant and I kept wondering whether differentiating by capitalisation wouldn’t create more confusion than it’d have benefits. Apparently the people in charge of the list and algorithm in iTunes thought the same and now things are case insensitive and the list is free of duplicates (at least in the German localisation). Good to see that someone is still working on details in iTunes!

A quick look at iTunes’ strings suggests that localisations (for German anyway) have also been improved. These are subtle points (like using ‘Darsteller’ instead or ‘Schauspieler’ which is more typical for film credits), but iTunes will leave a better impression this way.

Another new feature of this iTunes release seems to be some kind of subtitle support. That’s certainly a good thing but I’m not quite sure what exactly it means. The help pages suggest the feature is about toggling ‘extended subtitles/captions’ (Erweiterte Untertitel) with dialogue and additional descriptions of what happens in the film. From the (single) example file I have this cannot be used to toggle on and off a text track that has been added to a film by pasting it in. It also doesn’t seem to toggle external subtitle files which QuickTime displays when Perian is installed. So the question is: The display of what kind of information can be toggled? And where can I get such files? Which will quickly be followed by: How can such files be created? Obviously, at the end of the day, we’d want all sorts of language and assistive subtitles (or rather both subtitles and captions, if you want to pick that fight) in a single file and be able to select the one we need. I somewhat doubt that Apple will include all that in their iTunes Movie Store downloads and iTunes’ current single menu item for the feature suggests that the implementation is much less ambitious than my plan. But here we go, it’s a first step and let’s hope (but not hold our breaths) there will be further steps and more information in the future.

A rather neat improvement of the application that I missed when first using it is that the menus with playlists in them (all playlists you can add the song to and all playlists the song is contained in) in the contextual menu now correctly reflect the hierarchy of your playlist folders rather than being merely alphabetical. I like that. Bonus points if you tell me the song I got the menu below for. (That’s more like big time bonus points…)

Finally, iTunes’ co-operation with the eponymous store has been improved. In particular there are ‘live’ search results now which list matches for the part of the search term you typed so far. Definitely a handy feature, particularly as the store can be rather sluggish when jumping to new pages, making every click less a good deed. Just as Inquisitor, however, it suffers from the problem that the width of the menu containing the instant search results is determined by the rather small width of the search field which makes it hard to read the full text of the found results. UI nitpickers may also feel compelled to add that the apparent ‘menu’ which appears in no way looks like you’d expect a menu to look and also doesn’t display any capital letters in search results. In short: a good idea, but we’ll at least need to wait until iTunes 7.6 before it is well implemented.

P.S. iTunes stopped displaying most of my album cover art in Cover Flow mode after the update and it ‘prefers’ displaying the generic notes icon instead. Any idea how or why that happens? And how I can kick iTunes to do the right thing again? Removing the ‘iTunesAlbum Artwork’ folder didn’t really do the trick although artwork is stored within the music files rather than in iTunes’ own cache.

The other upgrade is to QuickTime 7.2, the installer of wich seems to be a sorry example of software updater quality control negligence for some. While this seems to include a number of security and other bug-related fixes under the hood, it finally removes the braindead limitation from QuickTime Player’s UI that kept people from playing films in full screen mode if they hadn’t paid another 30$ to Apple for the privilege. Great to see that it finally dawned on Apple that this strategy is crap. Particularly as this limitation has always been easy to circumvent with a line or three of AppleScript.

This isn’t to say that QuickTime Player got fixed UI-wise, of course. It is still ridden with ugly ‘PRO’ labels in some menu items. Menu items which look inactive but still highlight when you hover about them in an Microsoft-worthy strike of UI brokenness. Similarly they didn’t make the effort to actually localise the QuickTime Player application, so we get the sophisticated prettiness of clipped and mis-positioned text in German. Which pretty much assures (but doesn’t particularly surprise) us that Apple’s quality control in this region has a staff of 0 assigned to this matter.

And while the straightforward access to full-screen playing is a welcome addition, it doesn’t go far enough. For example when it comes to subtitles. Only recently Apple added some kind of subtitle support to QuickTime (which made me and others hope that they will include multi-lingual subtitles to their iTunes film offerings, something that hasn’t happened yet from what I have heard). And more relevantly, or at least more immediately usefully, the wonderful Perian plugin which enables QuickTime to play real world video files rather than just those from the sanitised world Apple would prefer to limit us to, now has support for external subtitle files in QuickTime.

The problem with that, however, is that you’ll always get to see the subtitles when they exist. Even if you don’t want to. And that QuickTime player refuses to show you the checkbox to toggle those subtitles unless you bend over pay that good old 30$ fee – presumably because toggling subtitles – a feature that even a 30€ crap DVD player has built in – is just the kind of thing which only ‘PRO’ users should be able to do. Ah well. But as QuickTime and its player aren’t bad in themselves but only in their UI and marketing, AppleScript is once more here to help us.

And hence, here’s a simple AppleScript – based on rather simple heuristics – that lets you toggle subtitles in a QuickTime player. Add it to your script menu and things will be good.