10 Things Apple Can Do to Make Us Truly Excited by iTunes

Posted 11/15/2010 at 4:01pm | by J.R. Bookwalter

6

Comments

Print

Apple generally loves to spring new stuff upon an unsuspecting world on the second weekday, and this Tuesday promises to be no exception. But rather than a nifty new gadget that requires a trip to the Apple Store, the company has cleverly slipped a preview of an iTunes-related “exciting announcement” onto their website. What could it be?

In case you haven’t heard, Apple is planning Something Really Big for Tuesday, November 16 (that’s tomorrow!) -- so big that they erased the home page of their website to announce, “Tomorrow is just another day. That you’ll never forget.” The only clue lies in the text “Check back here tomorrow for an exciting announcement from iTunes,” which promises to kick off at 10am EST (7am for all you sleepy Californians).

While you’re busy setting your alarm clock so you won’t miss a moment of the action, we here at MacLife.com have been busy brainstorming on how Apple could tweak iTunes to make it truly unforgettable -- and as always, we’d like to share our thoughts with you.


Cloud Streaming

The most anticipated iTunes feature is likely cloud streaming, with Apple leveraging both their acquisition of Lala.com earlier this year and the company’s new server farm in North Carolina that’s expected to open its doors any day now, all with the intention of putting your iTunes music library in the clouds and streaming it on-demand to wherever you have Internet access.

At the very least, a streaming iTunes model would make mobile devices with smaller storage capacity (for instance, an 8GB iPhone or even a 16GB iPad or iPod touch) suddenly that much more useful -- as long as you have wireless access (presumably either Wi-Fi or 3G), you can access your full music library, no matter how large it may be.

Of course, to be truly remarkable, Apple would have to do more than simply allow us to access our existing purchases. For example, what if you choose to save a few pennies and buy tracks from Amazon MP3 instead of iTunes? Would the software allow you to either upload your non-iTunes tracks or somehow intelligently hook into those tracks based on what’s in your library? (We’re guessing no, given the fact that you can’t share non-iTunes tracks via Ping, but we can dream.)

Before you get too excited, the folks at All Things Digital are already throwing virtual cold water on the cloud concept, claiming that Apple has reportedly made little progress with music labels on the required negotiations to make this happen. Or maybe the whole music industry was finally able to stifle their enthusiasm (and keep those leaks at bay) for once?

Music Subscriptions

We’ve all heard horror stories about the popular Spotify music subscription service, which has thus far failed to cross the Atlantic and land in the waiting arms of Americans across the nation. Rumors have been churning that Apple is either trying to curtail Spotify’s launch or possibly even acquire the company for their own (which Spotify flatly denies), presumably to fast-track an iTunes subscription model.

The concept behind iTunes subscriptions would be to pay a flat monthly (or possibly even annual) fee and get access to all the music you’d like, streamed from Apple’s cloud. Such a move would negate the need to download audio files and store them locally, but would require an Internet connection (and preferably with unlimited data) to be truly useful.

While Spotify is often cited as the best and brightest of the subscription models, they’re not the only kid in town -- Rhapsody has been doing it for some time at $9.99 per month, and the once-notorious Napster (now owned by Best Buy) also offers a similar service, both of which also have free iOS apps available today to tap into the services. (Rdio and MOG are two of the others).

Cue All Things Digital yet again to possibly rain on the subscription parade: In addition to claiming that cloud streaming isn’t coming to iTunes on Tuesday, the site is also going on record that subscriptions won’t be happening yet, given that music industry sources are completely in the dark about it. It’s unlikely that Apple would forge ahead without the support of its content partners, but who knows.


Home Sharing Gains Syncing

Maybe it’s less revolutionary than cloud streaming or subscriptions, but one item that many iTunes users would find handy is the ability to have Home Sharing automatically sync between multiple libraries -- rather than having to copy media between libraries yourself.

For example, a family might have two or three different iTunes libraries in one network -- say one for Dad, one for Mom and one for their kid. While your musical tastes probably vary wildly, there may be occasions where you want the ability to automagically sync content between the three systems, likely based on preferences that you first establish (possibly only select playlists, for instance).

Of course, there are already third-party utilities for this kind of thing, such as MediaRover, which we’ve outlined here before. However, MediaRover is for music only -- it can’t sync movies, TV shows, books, apps, et al, not to mention that it would be nice to do it all from iTunes in the first place.

Wireless Syncing

We’ve said it before and we’ll say it again: Apple has a great system in place with iTunes and their iOS mobile devices, but what’s with having to connect a USB dock connector cable just to slip new media onto our iPhone or iPad? Sure, there are times when you’ll be glad that’s the case -- for example, during a full restore from backup, when syncing gigabytes of music, movies, apps and more would simply be too slow otherwise.

That said, most of the time you just want to get a few pieces of content from iTunes to your mobile device quickly and efficiently. Since most of us have Wi-Fi enabled homes now (thanks to widespread adoption of the same aforementioned mobile devices), this should be a no-brainer for Apple to figure out how to do. When your iOS device is in range of the network, it shows up in iTunes and you can select what you want to sync, click the button and go -- preferably while even using the device to do something else at the same time.

Push-enabled Sync

Taking wireless sync even one step further, it’s really time for Apple to implement some kind of push-enabled sync between your iTunes library and your iOS device(s), without you having to think much about it. For example, if you buy a new app on your iPad, why should you have to wait until your next sync to add it to your iTunes library? Apple knows that you just bought it, so it should push it right to your desktop copy of iTunes, rather than having to copy it from your device.

One area where this kind of push technology would truly come in handy is for movies and TV shows. Start watching a show on your Apple TV, then resume it the next day on your iPad while on the go, thanks to iTunes pushing that data to any iOS device that has already synced the same media. It’s not unlike the Hulu Plus app, which already allows you to stop playing on one device (even the Playstation 3) and resume on another -- except in this case, you’d be able to do it with all of your iTunes media, whether it was purchased from Apple or added manually.

AirPlay: It Goes Both Ways

A video-packing version of AirPlay hasn’t even seen a public release yet and already we’re pining for the day when it will be a two-way street. As it is now, AirPlay can push videos from your iOS mobile device to your Apple TV -- don’t get us wrong, that’s pretty amazing, especially for devices like the iPhone 4 or fourth-generation iPod touch which can record video. No more fumbling for wires to attach it to the television, you just sit down and beam it straight to your ATV.

But why should AirPlay stop there? To be truly useful, we should be able to stream all of our iTunes content straight to our iOS device, no matter if we’re in the other room or halfway around the world. Apple’s own Remote app is already halfway there -- load it up and you’re presented with what looks like your iTunes library, but cue the disappointment as you discover that all it can do is control playing that media from your computer. Third-party apps such as AirVideo have the right idea, but they can’t tap into your iTunes library in an elegant way, such as the ability to resume watching from where you left off in the app.

It’s possible that Apple is already going to make this a reality -- MacRumors is reporting that iTunes 10.1 contains references to something called “iTunes Live Stream URL,” which was not in previous releases and only appeared with the update released last Friday. No one knows for sure, but we suspect that the picture will get clearer on Tuesday morning.





>> Next: Five more things Apple can do to excite us about iTunes