Hi there!
iTunes is a great product! Having used Macs since 1984, I’m still amazed with the innovative products that (the people working for) Apple comes up with.
I’ve just finished importing all my CDs into iTunes 3.0. My collection is now 12,888 MP3 songs (1378 albums). Importing those songs took me a couple of weeks. The smart playlists are great as they allow me to have my all current favorite songs on my iPod. I’m always sure to have the latest and greatest hits from my collection wherever I go as well as my all time favorite songs.
– Although most of the track titles could be imported from CDDB, I often had to correct the spelling. A spell checker would be welcome.
– Very often, CDDB supplied the track and artist fields in the wrong order which meant that I had to edit the track listings manually (switching tracks and artists). A one-click option to interchange the artist and title fields would be good to speed up the archiving process.
– Also capitalization of artist names and song titles could be done automatically in iTunes.
– An integration possibility with CDNow or Amazon would be more than welcome. That way, I could share my playlists with my friends and they would have an immediate link to buy the CDs.
– Online stores like CDNOW provide a lot of artist information (biography, links, CD covers, official web sites). An iTunes integration with those services would give a lot more information to the enduser.
– I’d like to create unique play lists, i.e. only one instance of each song would be included on those lists. As I’ve got a lot of CDs, some songs are available on various compilations. In order to save space on my hard drive, I’d like to delete the redundant songs automatically.
– Text handling in iTunes could be improved for large lists (especially batch functions for frequently used commands — a find and replace option to manage MP3 ID tags)
– Splitting firstnames, lastname of the artists would also allow for more flexibility.
– different classifications for single, maxi, album and compilation CDs would be interesting.
– separating optional artist names into their own fields would allow to keep major artists grouped:
e.g. Tom Jones feat. Rob Thomas would be split into „Tom Jones“ (major artist) and „feat. Rob Thomas“ as secondary artist (don’t tell him I said he’s a secondary artist). The same is true for names like „Run DMC vs Jason Nevins“.
– automatic detection and removal of remixes and special edits which polute the main play lists
As you can probably see, those ideas are mostly useful for large libraries of several thousand songs. For a couple of hundred songs, this can probably be done manually if there were more fields for personal tags/categories. I’m currently thinking of creating several scripts to do this and manage my playlists through HyperCard which can use AppleEvents to operate iTunes. A complete solution in iTunes would be better… 🙂
Keep up the fantastic work!
Joe.
