From: Graham Nelson Date: Sun Dec 23, 2001 08:54:46 pm Europe/London To: notes201@macintouch.com Subject: iPod and iTunes: can't we Listen Different? I'm genuinely tempted by the iPod, but am held back partly by the price (especially high if you're in the UK), and partly by the fact that it simply doesn't implement the best feature (bookmarking) of the cheap MP3 player I already have: the Rio 500, which although two years old is holding up surprisingly well. Paradoxically, the tiny Rio feels more flexible than the mighty iPod. So why is this? iPod and iTunes, while in so many ways excellent, suffer from having too narrow a model of "what people want to listen to". They both basically assume that music consists of a fairly small selection of sub-twenty-minute songs divided up by chunks of silence on studio-recorded pop albums, which you want filed away somewhere but without caring where or how, and without wanting any other access to it. Here's my personal list of things which are in consequence unsatisfactory. Not one of these features would need any change to the iPod hardware: this is a software wishlist, not a give-me-still-more-gadgets-for-my-money wishlist. (i) iPod doesn't have bookmarks, because why would you want to remember where you are in a 4-minute Lou Reed number? But I use my player to listen to a great deal of spoken-word audio (audio books, radio plays, etc.) which comes in large files: e.g. 38M might be typical, with a running time of 70 minutes. I do want to be able to return to one of a number of current tracks where I left off. My present player has 16 bookmarks, so why not iPod, whose capacity is so vastly greater? (ii) By most accounts, the iPod chokes on files too large to fit into its RAM cache, by thrashing the hard disc continuously, running the battery down and greatly increasing the risk of damage from nudges or drops. There were also reports of playback glitches on every file longer than 20M. I hope these were merely early bugs to be ironed out; the fact that Apple's own testing didn't find them speaks volumes. (iii) Both iPod and iTunes are unable to play from one mp3 to the next without a gaping silence in between. In response to Bill B's comment that "there very much IS a technical reason why MP3 playback cannot be done completely seamlessly and it has to do with the MP3 specification itself", I point out that while my Rio thing does faintly stutter at a track boundary, the pause is nothing like as gross as that on iTunes, which makes multi-part classical music symphony movements sound staccato. (E.g., the final movement of Mahler's Resurrection Symphony, which on my recording is divided into about 15 tracks at tempo boundaries. Spoken word discs and medleys in live performances of rock music behave similarly.) (iv) iTunes can't solve this problem by ripping CD tracks together into a single mp3. It's very easy to rip an AIFF from a CD regardless of track boundaries, e.g. joining tracks 1 to 15 into a single chunk. The Toast Audio Extractor does this perfectly happily, for instance. So why can't iTunes do the same? (v) iTunes can't cope with MP3s not always living in a single place which is continuously accessible. (This is why iPod synchronisation is basically a bodge.) Example: my main music collection lives on an external Firewire drive, because it's far too big for my laptop. But my laptop is only connected to the external drive when at home on my table. So I have duplicates of some favourite albums on the laptop hard drive, for listening to when on the move. Does that seem outrageously eccentric behaviour? It does to iTunes, which double-enters the tracks in its library, so that they can't be told apart or played in any consistent way, without ridiculous bodges like changing the ID3 tags on the local laptop copies of the files so that they have a different genre. (vi) iTunes doesn't allow multiple Libraries (which would be an obviously sensible way to handle problems like the above external drive conundrum). You can't have a Library indexing your own music and another indexing your partner's. Or one Library holding music and another holding spoken word. Or one Library holding stuff on one drive and another holding stuff on another (e.g. a Library showing the contents of your iPod). Or one Library holding stuff accessible to all Mac OS X users on a given machine and then another Library holding just your own private stuff. Or one Library holding stuff you've listened to already and another holding stuff you haven't. Or a Library of mp3s which exist only on CDs burned in the past and now sitting in your desk drawer. What makes this especially annoying is that clearly iTunes has all the coding it would need to handle this: it already has playlists, external devices, etc. as alternative locations for files. (vii) Because iTunes acts as a sort of alternative Finder for MP3 files, it hides away a process whereby the real Finder view starts to drift far apart from the iTunes one. You get no control over what iTunes calls your files -- e.g. putting the track number at the beginning of the filename is not an option (as it was in the program which iTunes is a port of, so Apple must have decided to abolish this). When you change the ID3 tags for a track using iTunes, which I must say offers really excellent tagging support, the actual filename doesn't change. It will often still be called "Track 3" is a folder called "Unknown Album" in "Unknown Artist". (It won't even be in the Music folder which all Mac OS X users have created for them, because iTunes inexplicably puts stuff into sub-sub-sub-folders of Documents instead.) Ideally, iTunes would have some kind of rules for keeping MP3s named and stored away into subfolders based on their current ID3 details; it could have Rules rather as Mail has Rules for filing away emails. (The welcome new Scriptability may well allow us to write deeply messy Apple Scripts to achieve this, I guess.) Okay, not everybody would use the above features. But none of them strike me as unreasonable things for a user to want, and all of them are missing mostly because because of a lack of imagination on Apple's part about the diversity of people's listening habits. Can't some us Listen Different? -- Graham Nelson