
Ask HN: So, what's wrong with iTunes? (or what more would you want?) - lut4rp
People have been talking for a long time about how iTunes is not a good music manager, when compared to say, AmaroK or foobar2000. We just don't need music players anymore, we have monstrously huge libraries that need a fast, slick manager. So here's what I'd want an opinion on...<p>1. What's wrong with iTunes?
2. What would you like to see in an OS X music "manager"/player?
3. What is your current favorite app for doing the above on OS X?<p>(I am not asking this for either Windows or Linux because I believe people are pretty satisfied with their options on both these systems (AmaroK, foobar2000, Exaile etc.)
======
bkovitz
Support for classical music.

iTunes treats individual movements as "songs", not part of a complete piece of
music. So, you can't, say, click on Dvorak's Piano Trio in F minor, you have
to first create a temporary album to hold all three movements.

Also, the searching is messed up for classical music. The composer's name, for
example, is sometimes under "artist", and sometimes in another column, and
sometimes not there at all. A column for "composer" would fix that.

Those and a few other obvious and easy tune-ups would make iTunes usable for
classical music.

~~~
ubernostrum
I pretty aggressively re-tag my classical collection, since AFAIK there's no
online store or CD database which comes close to getting the information right
on a consistent basis.

So, for example, right now I'm listening to the first movement of Dvořák's
cello concerto; I've tagged the track as follows:

<http://static.b-list.org/files/itunes-classical-metadata.png>

When I bought the CD years ago, of course, CDDB filled in the "artist" as
"Antonin Dvorak".

Keeping all the metadata correct has been a royal pain, but worth it in terms
of being able to quickly find things and generate playlists keying off things
like the composer field.

As an aside, I notice that Amazon's MP3 download page for the above recording
does actually seem to display the right data for at least some fields -- I
don't plan to buy it again to find out whether they got the whole thing right,
though. And sometimes iTunes gets the "grouping" field right for multi-
movement works, though not with enough frequency to avoid the need for lots of
manual re-tagging.

------
scottjackson
I think iTunes on the Mac is pretty decent (compared to the Windows version,
at any rate. God, have you tried doing any heavy I/O stuff in iTunes for
Windows?).

I'd _love_ the ability to have nested queries in Smart Playlists. The only
"solution" at the moment involves having folders full of Smart Playlists for
individual queries and then having another Smart Playlist to assemble that
"level" of the query.

I'd also like the Genius Recommendation feature to be a bit better. The Genius
Playlist feature is pretty solid at the moment (when it came out in iTunes 8,
I was pretty much blown away), but the recommendation stuff is still nowhere
near as accurate as what it's actually trying to emulate -- asking an expert,
"hey, if I like this music, what else would I like?"

Edit: Oh, and more album art in Apple's databases. The Gracenote stuff isn't
exactly fantastic. I know there's TuneUp and stuff like that, but Apple boasts
that it's a complete feature built in to iTunes, when really, it's not that
comprehensive in my experience. Who knows, maybe I just listen to obscure
music.

~~~
zeckalpha
Genius is nowhere near as good as Pandora.

~~~
GHFigs
Genius and Pandora are quite different. They have some overlap in
functionality, but at it's core Genius is about the music you already know and
have. It's more about solving the paradox of choice that occurs when you have
a large music library than it is a recommendation and discovery engine.

~~~
zeckalpha
Actually, Genius doesn't recognize most of the music I have, and Pandora can
set up stations with long lists of artists and songs.

My library is large and varied enough I no longer use either. But I preferred
Pandora.

------
riffic
It's dog slow for huge libraries, and doesn't watch directories for
added/removed files.

musicbrainz support would be nice

~~~
Legion
Watch directories is the big one.

Virtually every other music manager supports watch directories. Its omission
from iTunes isn't due to them overlooking the feature. Rather, it's a coercive
measure to try and push users towards acquiring all their new music through
the iTunes Music Store.

It becomes the "path of least resistance" when you intentionally omit features
to make all other paths harder.

~~~
GHFigs
That's quite a theory. Wouldn't one expect to find other instances of such
coercive omission? And yet, double-clicking a file in the Finder or Explorer
still opens it in iTunes, which by default copies the track into your library.
Ripping CDs still works the same. Drag and drop still works the same.

No, I think it has more to do with watch folders not being a feature in high
demand than any conspiratorial nonsense.

------
Radix
Single biggest flaw, as far as I'm concerned, is the inability to script the
folder hierarchy. If I want All albums folders to be prepended by the release
year I should be able to do that.

Edit: Also, sometimes I have correctly named mp3's, but I haven't tagged them.
Itunes gracefully renames my files to 'unknown' removing any trace to the
correct name. And, if the files were in a folder prepended with the album year
iTunes will kindly create a new folder to hold the files to leave the album
art in the original folder. (okay, that last one is Windows only)

------
jquery
I know you didn't ask about Windows users, but assuming you are from Apple and
have an ear there, please forward this message to the appropriate
individual...

With my fairly large, multi-gigabyte library, iTunes often takes minutes to
respond to user input. Sometimes during syncing it can take up to 30 minutes
to respond to my input. Please performance-profile iTunes before frustrated
and contractually-obligated-to-use-iTunes iPhone users slap you with a class-
action lawsuit.

~~~
jaaron
I haven't experienced this and my library is around 100 GB. Could it be
something with your disk? Is the library on a local disk or remote disk?
What's the speed (rpm) of the disk?

~~~
jquery
External (not remote) hard drive, 7200 RPM. Haven't had any problems using
other programs with it.

------
GTanaka
1\. The biggest problem I say is its entirely closed nature. I don't mean
simply closed source -- I've used tools such as Mediamonkey for Windows and
have been relatively satisfied -- but entirely closed to plugins or user
developed support. Specifically I refer to the inability to use/add anything
to use FLAC, lyrics search, grabbing high quality album art ( a la
allcdcovers.com ), social integration (mixtape, last.fm), 3rd party hardware
syncing, and library visualization. Each of these could be solvable if only
Apple allowed some sort of plugin integration

2\. See suggestions above

3\. Not using mac.

------
martey
Better support for another MP3 players/mobile devices? Right now, if I use
iTunes, I need to use an iPod or iPhone as my MP3 player. Other companies
(e.g. Palm) that have tried to use iTunes to manage music have been shut down
by Apple.

~~~
zeckalpha
Missing Sync lets me use my Blackberry with my iTunes library. I assume Palm
works as well.

------
pudo
There is a lot that could be done regarding library management: It should be a
lot faster, support bulk operations a lot better and implement fragmented
libraries.

What I mean by that is that I use a MacBook with a 240GB hard disk for media
stuff. I'd like to have a part of my library on the macbook (including stuff I
listen to regularly, podcasts etc.) and a second part (my lib is around 200G)
on an external HDD or AFP mount. At the moment I can only do that if I don't
have iTunes manage my lib and then, still, the handling of missing files isn't
too great.

IMO they should also get serious about supporting movies (as in: .avi, .mkv) -
I'd love to use iTunes for that and helper apps demonstrate how much can be
done here (epg guides etc.). Again, that'd require splitting my lib over
various USB and AFP drives.

I really think there is demand for a well-made iTunes clone on the Mac, as
long as it avoid feature creep: player software should manage and play music,
I'll take care of getting it - keep your BitTorrent portal stuff to yourself,
thank you.

------
sjs382
I _really_ like iTunes (on Windows) and don't know how it could be made
better. It's perfect for the way I want to browse/listen to music. Am I alone
in this?

~~~
scottjackson
I have problems with iTunes for Windows because the QuickTime platform isn't
the native way to handle media on a Windows box (which it is in OS X). So
already you're dealing with a beast that's more complicated than it should be.

That said, I use iTunes on my Windows PC. It's not great for large libraries
or doing heavy I/O stuff (changing meta-data for multiple long movies, for
instance), but it gets the job done and it's a pretty seamless experience
between the music player, the store and the iPod/iPhone.

------
mgrouchy
I like itunes, my main issue to date is that it is godawful slow. Which is why
I switched to songbird, which is still pretty slow, but not as slow.

------
alaskamiller
Better video/media files support. It's such as hassle ripping my tv show or
movies DVDs and getting it work with iTunes. The meta tags they do for tv
seasons or movies don't even work that well. For example, trying to setup a 1
gig file with a movie poster always crashes iTunes for me and my tv shows can
only be organized alphabetically.

------
phamilton
I use Amarok for my music needs. The feature I enjoy most is the Now Playing
playlist in a split window with my music library. I can add whole playlists,
whole albums, whole discographies, or just individual songs.

Another feature I would like to see is some sort of network control... I am
frequently on the couch with my laptop, and my desktop is playing music. Or my
roommate wants to queue up a song. What I finally did was use Amarok and VNC
(with a java web client) to let anyone log in and update the playlist...)

------
charliepark
It's absurd that I can't search in both podcasts and my normal music library
with one search field. I have a number of podcasts from live shows (like NPR's
"Live Concerts From All Songs Considered"), and if I look up an artist ("Neko
Case"), I'll only get tracks from within the "Podcasts" or "Music" folder
(depending on which one I'm currently in). I can't see any reason why search
shouldn't offer a global search of iTunes folders.

------
cmars232
Music library is too locked to a single device.

If I put podcasts and music on my iPod with Rhythmbox from my work PC, iTunes
will happily eradicate everything it doesn't know about as soon as I plug it
in when I get home.

If I plug in my iPod while someone else is logged into my mac, iTunes
immediately asks if it can wipe my iPod.

Maybe this protects the interests of the record industry, it sure isn't useful
in any way to the end user.

------
tolmasky
Anyone remember when you could share your library on iTunes with anyone, not
just on your local network. Yeah, I'd like that back...

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nickfox
iTunes on windows, perfect? When I click on a link to something on iTunes, it
opens up another browser window and _then_ opens up iTunes and leaves that
orphaned browser window sitting around. Seriously, is that the best they can
do?

------
zackola
Wrong with iTunes: Slowness, Storage of metadata in proprietary format, Easier
to detect/remove dupes.

What I want? Something as fast and responsive as the original versions of
winamp, with the search, playlist, podcast and sync functionality of iTunes.

------
devicenull
It's single threaded. All my music is hosted on my NAS, which I connect to via
wireless. iTunes fairly regularly freezes up for 15 seconds when I switch
between playlists, or while it's attempting to add music to my library.

------
cakesy
The most important thing you can add is the ability to sink between two
computers, so I can sink my iphone to my work computer, and my home computer.

~~~
riffic
leave the sink out of this!

