A biased demolition

Booting into windows to complete an assignment for university, I quickly found myself procrastinating as I usually do. Unable to do any programming, I decided to report into my findings regarding that application which is supposedly the epitomy of music playback on common everyday computers.

Compatriot to the most successful portable music player, my journey into iTunes proved to be insightful into the different development approach which Apple has taken, compared to amaroK. Lets start looking at what I believe iTunes does well…

1. First impressions

Indeed, iTunes is a blindingly different piece of software, at least in the windows world. It’s not bland, boring nor uninteresting.

2. Integration

Apple is reknowned for their attention to making things flow. Integrated cd ripping, cd burning, iPod support, iTunes store, visualisations, mini player etc.

3. Playlist Manipulateion

Much like JuK, using and managing playlists is fairly ovious and well structured.

To the point, I think that iTunes is a great application which targets a nieve user who just wants ‘things to work’. Unfortunately, I found that any user level which is above that of a luddite will be confuzzled and irritated by the quirks which iTunes brings with it. Let me explain.

The Library
Firstly, collection building. iTunes didn’t pull in my ogg files, even though I am 100% certain that windows can play them. Took me a good 2 hours to discover I needed a strange plugin/extension/stand-alone application (i’m still not sure which it is) to play them. They are still not in my library however. On the note of extending iTunes – I couldn’t find a way of using the plugins. In fact, I’m still not even sure that plugins exist. I wanted to give iScrobbler a try, but blah! – no idea. Additionally, I found that iTunes wanted to consolidate my library. I was VERY scared of this option, since there was no information as to what it did or how it did it. You have to understand I am very anal about my music collection and the way it is organised.

Playlist Shuffle
I recently integrated a dynamic play mode into amaroK, which is, I admit, similar to iTunes’ party shuffle. It was an idea which was inspired by, but not modelled on. I found it irritating that I couldn’t select from more than one source to append to the playlist. Also, why are a random set of tracks inserted for the ‘history’ items on load? *shrug*. Playing with party shuffle a little more, and I found iTunes to be sluggish in the way it added and removed tracks. Adding a new track after the removal of another gave at least half a second of delay. Maybe this is intended, but I can’t say that I know why.

Visualisations
I liked the way the visualisations integrated into the window until I wanted to modify my playlist. There was simply no way of making the visualistion take up only a portion of the window. I would have really liked to have it in the location under the playlist panel, replacing the cover art viewer.

ID3 Tags
I like my tags with the id3 v1 standard. Not this 2.4.1.3.2.3.54.2 crap. Why can’t iTunes respect this and read them properly. Well, i thought maybe iTunes will read v1 if no v2 tag is present. I found a menu entry which is titled ‘Convert id3 tags’. I clicked. This is what came up:

As you can imagine, I immediately pressed cancel. What was iTunes intending to do? Overwrite my good tags with the bad? I had no idea.

Quirks

• I found it very strange that the ‘View Options’ entry in the Edit menu was only for selecting which columns to show in the playlist view…
• After selecting ‘Show system tray icon’, I expected the Close button in the titlebar to minimise the window to the system tray. Did it? NO! it shut the application! How irritating. I needed to press minimise to collapse it to the tray.
• Lack of tooltips. For instance, I found some ambiguous terms in the smart playlist creator: [x] Live updating – What does that mean? Isn’t a smart playlist meant to be dynamic always?
• The system tray. Clicking on the tray icon seems to do absolutely nothing. I wanted to maximise the window, and was forced to right click, and select ‘maximise’. Mouse wheel action on the tray in change volume would have been nice to.
• I also found the painting of the entire application quite sluggish, but it is possible that my machine and windows settings are plain crap.

Overall, I found iTunes to be frustrating and irritating to use as an experienced computer user and one who is obsessive about my music collection. A great application for any beginner to start using digital audio with.

This sums up my biased extraction of some points of note which I picked up whilst using iTunes. Please don’t blame me – I started developing on another media player for a reason.