SansPoint

Okay, so, iTunes 7.1… it’s nothing special, though for a .1 version, it does have some really great features. Unfortunately, the best of these, Sort Tags, were rendered nearly useless because they cannot be edited en masse. Thankfully, the wonderful Doug of Doug’s Applescripts for iTunes, there’s the Batch set Sort Tags Script. The full screen CoverFlow is useless, especially since I never use CoverFlow in general.^[1] I don’t buy movies (yet), and have no kids, so the international ratings are of no use, either, and of course, I don’t have an AppleTV, or anything to hook it up to.

I’d love to see some new features in iTunes 7.2, or 8.0, or some other version that’ll be out before the end of the decade:

• Browse by Album Artist: This is the big one, and I know I’m not the only one who wants it. Certain albums, such as the soundtrack for The Blues Brothers have primarily songs by one artist, but a couple songs by others. I can tag the whole album with the Album Artist “The Blues Brothers” but clicking that in the browser only shows the tracks on that album with the artist tagged as “The Blues Brothers” - I have to make it a compilation and bring it up in Compilations.

• Sort albums by year in the browser: This is just me being anal. I sort my records by year of recording or original release. To have iTunes sort them alphabetically is a little annoying. I could play with the Sort Album tag, probably, to do this, but why the hell should I?

• Resize the track number column in grouped view: Because I’m an album dork, I view my collection as albums grouped with artwork. This is great, and I can resize the artwork column, but the little pseudo-column which displays track numbers can’t be resized at all… and it’s more than twice the size it really needs to be! I don’t know about you, but I have very few albums with more than 99 tracks, let alone the thousand it looks like it could display comfortably. Please!

• Better podcast controls: Again, I’m not the only one who needs this. I want some podcasts to be checked at certain times; for example: the NPR 7: AM News Update should be checked at 7:30 or 8 each day. Other podcasts can be checked once a week, or set to be manually updated. Instead, to get my morning news and literature fix^[2], I have to update all my podcasts hourly.

• Music Videos out of the music library: PLEASE. I don’t like them there! I don’t want to listen to music and then suddenly have a video pop up! All of my videos are now unchecked so they don’t accidentally play. I don’t want to see music videos in CoverFlow. I don’t want to see music videos when browsing through albums. Take them away, please, Apple! I beg you!

• iPod support for Sort Tags, and displaying Album Artist tags: Seriously. Though my iTunes library is organized nicely, my iPod is going to put Laurie Anderson under L, not A. (EDIT: To my shock, my iPod supports Sort Tags! Everything was where it was supposed to be, after all.) Likewise, when I bring up a track from Oingo Boingo’s last album Boingo - it’ll display the artist “Oingo Boingo”, not the Album Artist “Boingo”. Please, let my anally compulsive tagging have a benefit when I’m on the go!

• A pony: Please?

1. It’s nice eye candy, but worthless unless I have a remote and a Cinema Display, or an AppleTV so I could control it from across the room. As a way to navigate a library and play music, though, it’s no good. The big problem is that it plays albums back to back in sequence. It doesn’t stop at the end of an album, just starts whatever’s afterward. I prefer to listen to albums as distinct entities, so I’ll stick with the browser for now. ↩
2. The Writer’s Almanac podcast is a wonderful thing. ↩