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

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

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Beefing Up the Little Things

Have you ever loaded up a bunch of music videos into iTunes and then scratched your head wondering why there’s no Music Videos library option? After all, you can change the “Media Kind” to Music Video under the Options tab of any given media, and yet if you want to see only your Music Videos, you’ll have to create a Smart Playlist to wrangle them. Unfortunately, if you want to sync them to your iOS device, it’s an “all or nothing” proposition -- you can’t add just the ones you want to a playlist and sync them. Color us confused.

iTunes also features a Radio category in your Library, but yet when you click on it there’s no way to just type in the call letters for a particular station -- and even if you could, the selection is woefully inadequate compared to the many iOS apps out there  better equipped for the task. You’re almost always better off going straight to the website for your radio station of choice and streaming the audio from there (or just using the aforementioned iOS apps).

Last but not least, how about those “Purchased on” playlists in the Store section? If you’re like us, you now have one for every iOS device you’ve bought in the last few years (or in our case, one for each of the four iPhones plus one for our original Apple TV as well as one for the iPad). You can easily get rid of them by control-clicking and selecting Delete, but it might be nice for iTunes to intelligently combine them as new devices are added -- or at least offer to remove the old ones.

MobileMe Implementation

Okay, so maybe the music labels don’t want to play ball yet with Apple and allow cloud streaming or subscriptions. But did you know that you are able to upload music tracks or other DRM’ed media to your MobileMe iDisk today and use the iOS app to stream it right to your mobile device? It’s true!

It seems like there’s some middle ground where incorporating MobileMe into iTunes in this manner makes sense. Why not add a MobileMe playlist category to iTunes, similar to how you can have a shared photo gallery in iTunes? Drop music into your iDisk and stream it right to iTunes, or sync it back to your iOS device.

We still think that Apple needs to open MobileMe up to the masses by making it free, and part of that plan has got to include opening up more storage to every user. Tie your iTunes account to your MobileMe account and we’ll all likely get more use out of them both -- even if it’s just using the cloud service as a temporary stopgap to make iTunes do what we want.


Streamline Your Shopping

While we can’t imagine Apple using their home page for something trivial, let’s not forget that the holidays are upon us and Black Friday is almost single digits away. Most of the iTunes Store is now composed of mostly HTML-formatted content, which means that Apple can push new stuff to the software without requiring a trip to Software Update -- for example, the very announcement posted on Apple’s home page is now also front and center on the iTunes home screen, and Cupertino also magically pushed Ping right onto the iPad’s iTunes app over the weekend.

So how might Apple improve the iTunes shopping experience? Neither Ping nor Genius have been as revolutionary as we’d hoped (although Apple’s sales data might show differently), but some things like My Wish List give us hope. Unfortunately, your iTunes Wish List isn’t the same as the Wish List you might have on Apple TV, so it seems that Cupertino still has some work to do there, for example.

In general, shopping on iTunes seems to always take a few clicks more than we’d like -- so here’s hoping for some smaller tweaks alongside anything Earth-shattering on Tuesday.

Why No 64-Bit Love for the Mac?

One of our biggest disappointments with the arrival of iTunes 10 (next to Ping, that is) had to be that the media player software is still not a 64-bit application after all these years, despite Mac OS X 10.6.5 Snow Leopard pushing the technology and most third-party software developers having already adopted it.

It’s inconceivable to us that the Windows version of iTunes has been rockin’ 64-bit for a while now, and as such the app is simply faster and more efficient on Microsoft’s OS of choice than it is on Apple’s own operating system. We really, truly thought that Apple would have taken advantage of iTunes’ double-digit version number to make the software fly at long last, but instead all we got was another facelift. Oh, and Ping. So, not much, really.

That said, I doubt that Apple would wipe out the entire home page of their website for nearly 24 hours just for a 64-bit version of iTunes -- but we would thank them for it, just the same.

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While we sit and wait to see what Apple will bring to iTunes in just a few short hours, have a look at the Waffle blog -- they’ve compiled a list of which countries Apple has posted the “exciting announcement” on their home page, and it appears to only be ones where the iTunes Store is available -- although a couple, like Greece and Luxembourg, who have the full music store, are excluded.

What does it all mean? Feel free to interject your own theories -- no matter how crazy they might sound -- in the comments below.

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