What’s Wrong With iTunes & iPod & How To Fix It.

I’m not even going to get into what’s wrong with the iTunes, or dignify it with a link. What I’m more concerned with is the iTunes application and the iPod player. Now I have to say I mostly love both — I haven’t tried every portable media player, but the iPods are better than any of the ones I’ve tried. I love Smart Playlists. I love being able to search media any way I can imagine. BUT…

NO DUPLICATE FILE DETECTION

This is the number one thing wrong with iTunes/iPod. This is beyond stupid, because it’s not a hard problem to solve.

For starters: Adding new audio files should be idempotent. In what fucked up universe does Apple think that what you want is to fill up your iPod or iTunes library with multiple copies with the same name, except with ‘ 1′ ‘ 2′ etc appended?

Adding files a second time isn’t something you should do, normally but imagine you’re importing a bunch of files from a directory that already has some files you previously imported. In order NOT to get duplicates, you have to figure out WHICH files you already imported, and exclude them. You can’t do the obvious thing and just drag the whole directory to iTunes and have iTunes ignore files it already has.

And it’s true that detecting duplicates isn’t always unambiguous. For one thing, the same track can be in two different albums. If you’ve ever gotten a ‘best of’ CD and also have the original CDs, the same song will be in two different places. But if you ask iTunes to ‘show duplicates’ it thinks two tracks are duplicates even if their album name is different!

The solution? Spend a few days working on a smart duplicate detection algorithm. First off, if the file name and length and metadata match, it’s a duplicate. Second, if the file length and metadata match, and the filename is mostly the same, it’s a duplicate. If the metadata doesn’t match, it’s probably not a duplicate.

If the filename and metadata are the same but the bitrate is different, the user needs options:

1. Replace lower (or higher) bitrate files with the higher (or lower) bitrate files. I personally always want the highest bitrate, but others may care more about disk space.

2. Store both versions, but keep them in separate subdirectories, with some intelligent options about which gets displayed or played. For instance on your computer, you’d probably want to play the high bitrate version, but on your iPod, you might want the low bitrate version as a space-saver.

NO IPOD TO ITUNES COPY

I suppose the justification for this has something to do with DRM and keeping the lawyers happy, but it’s bullshit. It’s EASILY defeatable with third party software. And besides, why is Apple enforcing ‘no copy’ rules on MY files that AREN’T DRM? I don’t even have any AAC files — everything I have is MP3.

The stupidest thing about this restriction is the way that all the 3rd party applications defeat it — they use Apples own iTunes application programming interface! In other words, you can easily write an application that runs iTunes, and then tells iTunes to copy files from the iPod into the local library.

NO LIBRARY TRANSER

Well iTunes 8 has a library backup option, but in what universe is it going to be convenient to back up hundreds of gigabytes of audio files to DVD-R, let alone CD-R? Apple has a page about how to do this without burning discs but why the HELL can’t they figure out an easier way, e.g. network or USB transfer?

The easiest way to deal with this is to copy the ITunes music files to an external or network drive, and then import them into an empty iTunes library on the new machine. That doesn’t preserve any of the useful metadata like playlists, track ratings, play frequency, etc. Your new iTunes library will have amnesia.

And if you buy files at the iTunes store, you’ll have an even bigger nightmare due to DRM. God help you in that case.

iPod Sound Playback Quality

Please Apple, I’ll pay $20 more for my next iPod if you’ll work on this. While iPods have the reputation for having the best sound quality amongst portable media players, I don’t buy it. I’m an old guy who can’t hear past 14 khz. I can’t hear the difference in a lot of situations where other people claim to, but I can easily tell the difference between the output of my iPod Classic and desktop computer sound with the same headphones.

Could this — gasp — be a selling point? Spend a little more on the Digital to Analog convertor, upsample the audio and run it 24bit/96Khz, make fewer comprimises on the analog circuitry?

DRM IS DUMB

What do you call a technology that A) prevents people from doing useful things they have every right to do, B) Is easy to circumvent? DUMB. DRM doesn’t do what the record companies wish it did — protect them from illegal copying. And it does nothing but cause consumers headaches. And unless big players like Apple say fuck it, it’s useless it will only get worse.

Amazon.com already sells nearly everything available in the iTunes library as non-DRM mp3 files. Their license agreement is insane, but that’s a topic for another day. The point being this: The piggies were out of the barn before Apple even started down this road; they need to start operating in the real word.

And yes I know Apple sells DRM-free files at a premium, but so what? How many consumers who aren’t big nerds like us get royally screwed every day by this bullshit?

WHY NOT THINK DIFFERENT?

Whatever else you can say about Apple — and people say PLENTY — Apple presents itself as being innovators, forward thinkers, and the enablers of their customer’s creativity. And sometimes Apple’s actions match their image. But we all need to hold their feet to the fire, and make them live up to their hype.