October 2003 Archives

My productivity was completely destroyed last night, as I spent most of the evening playing with Apple's new iTunes for Windows jukebox application. Rather than make the effort to formulate an actual opinion about it and present it in a well-written and well-reasoned article, I give you a disorderly sequence of bullet points, each corresponding to a half-baked thought that went through my head as I used the software.

• "Hell froze over", says apple.com. And indeed it did, because after the travesty that was every single version ever of Quicktime for Windows, I never thought I'd be willingly downloading another Apple software product.
• 19561KB of download? Are they bundling OS X with this thing? To think I ever thought that WMP9 was bloatware.
• Reboot my computer? For an mp3 jukebox app? You wish, iTunes. Oddly, without a reboot it seems to run fine anyway.
• "Do you want iTunes to irrevocably screw up your carefully organised mp3 collection?" NO. Phew. Glad I was paying attention to that one.
• "Do you want to use iTunes as the default player for audio files?" Thanks, but I don't think I'm quite ready for that yet.
• Brushed aluminium interface, how I haven't missed you at all. Ow, my eyes.
• That's a pretty nice realtime search feature.
• Why can't I add a column for filename to the tracks list? It lets me add columns for everything else. My mp3 collection is tidily organised in directories but somewhat lacking in ID3 tags, so path and filename is what I want to see most. I can't realistically use iTunes to fix all my missing ID3 tags, because all the tracks that are nicely separated by directory all smoosh together in the absence of any metadata to sort by. How am I supposed to organise this? This is an idiotic oversight. Even WMP9 got this bit right.
• How do you make the list jump to the currently playing track? (Yeah, yeah, RTFM... but I thought the point of Apple stuff is that you don't have to.)
• I like the design of the music store and its integration with the app, although the range on offer seems quite limited.
• What the hell? In the preferences there's a box marked 'use iTunes as the default player for audio files' and it's checked. What the hell is with this Apple doctrine of utter perversity? Ask the user something during the install process and then do the exact opposite of what they said? Which level of hell am I in now?
• I wonder if this ratings system is any good. Does it use ratings to weight playback frequency, or is it another boondoggle like the same feature in WMP9? Couldn't find out, time will tell. At least it doesn't seem to gradually rate everything up to 5 stars over time, so it might at least be somewhat useful.
• The volume normalisation feature is a nice idea.
• Tried to import a folder that had MIDI files in a subfolder. I returned later to see it frozen on a .MID file, dead. It's task-killing time. Apple is doing this because it hates me.

So, I had a change of heart and decided to write some sort of conclusion here. Despite the negativity present in this entry, I haven't given up on iTunes yet -- there are some pretty nice things about it, in fact. But it's clear that to get the most out of it, I'm going to have to fix up the ID3 tags in all my MP3 files, which is a huge job. Using iTunes to fix up this metadata should have been easy, but its broken design means I need to find a better solution elsewhere.

Nevertheless it's possible that I might move over to iTunes in the future. Currently I'm using the ancient but reliable Winamp 2 along with the superb but hideously ugly LongPlayer for its powerful playlist management and ratings system. The combination is working very well, but I'd rather run one piece of software instead of two. iTunes still has issues, but that's understandable for an application that's been released for less than a day. Despite Apple's marketing spiel, it's clearly not "the best Windows app ever" (that title would probably be awarded to something that didn't crash within a couple of hours of installation), but perhaps, given time, it will be the best Windows jukebox.

I haven't blogged for so long that I'm having to remember how to do it from first principles. This will be a quick one, but now that I have more free time (actually, all of my time is now free) I have no excuse to neglect the blog. And I can finally get to work on the list of projects that have taken a back seat to my thesis for the last twelve months.

Anybody out there looking to employ a 25 year old computer scientist who doesn't want to work in computers any more?

[Listening to: 14:31 (Reload Remix) - Global Communication - Space Night Vol. 2 (5:20)]