iTunes 8 feature wishlist

Video

Apple has started selling videos on the iTunes store and the program has evolved from a music jukebox to a complete solution for music and video management. However, it is lacking some critical features. Here’s what I suggest Cupertino incorporates into the next release:

1. The ability to purchase high definition 1080p media from the iTunes Store.
2. Import of unencrypted Blue-ray, DVD, HD-DVD media (AUDIO_TS and VIDEO_TS directories) or conversion support to H.264.

iPod

The iPod has gone through a number of revisions and is a solid product that doesn’t need many revisions. Here are a couple of my suggestions for making the best portable media player on the market even better:

1. Shuffle by Album support on the iPhone and iPod touch.
2. The ability to browse by Album artist in the navigational menu. This feature is kind of supported — Cover Flow mode sorts by Album Artist.
3. Enable transcoding of Apple Lossless to 128 kbps AAC on the iPod. Currently enabled for the iPod shuffle.
4. Browse artists by the “Sort Artist” field tag instead of the “Artist” tag, if it is set. This will help get rid of duplications caused by featured artists or remixers entered into the Artist field.
5. 802.11n Wi-Fi.

Metadata

iTunes is great for managing a large music library and I’m constantly using the search feature to find a song or album of interest. However, I think that the program needs to allow room for some new metadata fields:

1. Ability to tag songs as clean or explicit. Currently songs downloaded from the iTunes Store come with these labels but you cannot add them to existing media in your library. This would be nice for parents to be able to restrict the music younger children could access in the library. This can be done in Mp3tag with the ITUNESADVISORY tag set to “1″ (explicit) or “2″ (clean).
2. Automatic lyric import. iTunes already supports the addition of lyrics but this must be done manually on a per-song basis.
3. Original artist field support (i.e. for cover songs).
4. Fields for catalog number, music label, and release type (i.e. bootleg, deluxe/special edition, EP, promo, remaster, single).
5. Fields for original release date and/or re-release date.
6. Subtitle support (i.e. for remixes and alternate versions).
7. Ability to modify play/skip count values, including batch addition and subtraction.
8. Ability to replace existing album artwork with art downloaded from the iTunes store. Currently requires manual removal of existing artwork before downloaded artwork appears.
9. BPM and key detection.

Interface

iTunes 7 introduced a number of changes to the interface, many of them controversial. I welcomed some of the new changes but still see some room for improvement:

1. Ability to search lyrics and restrict your search to only the lyrics field.
2. Make the grouping tag work like it does on iTunes Store. If you browse the Complete U2 collection that Apple advertised, you will see that the collection breaks down per disc with titles of each original U2 release in the set. You can hide or reveal the tracks on each disc by clicking the arrow on the left of the header. I would like to see something like this implemented in iTunes, especially for classical albums, which often contain multiple symphonies on a single disc.
3. Support for lyrics display in iTunes, not just on iPod.
4. Multiple artist support in the browser pane.
5. Improved print layouts with album artist support.

Maintenance

1. Find songs without artwork.
2. Find dead songs.
3. Rescan soundcheck, gapless values.

I may be able to address these two:

Find songs without artwork.

Find dead songs.

http://wmwiki.com/downloads/itsfv/beta/?M=D

http://wmwiki.com/downloads/itsfv/

Cheers, McoreD

theres a few things i would like to see in itunes 8.

i read on another site about someone wanting to have multiple id3 tags for songs so when you have songs in your library from different albums they can be linked together under one file, for example i have leona lewis – a moment like this which i got from her single when it released last year, it then was released on now 66 so im left with 2 copys of the same song.

as i have a visual impairment i use a screen resolution of 800×600, however if i go in the preferences for the itunes program i can click on apply or ok buttons as they dont show up, i then have to change my resolution, click apply then ok on itunes settings then once settings window is closed change my resolution back to normal, im sure this can be fixed because i used to have a similar issue with some software i use at work, audaenterprise’s legacy archive window had this exact same problem however last week when i upgraded to audaenterprise gold the legacy archive window could be seen in full despite my high resolution setting so why cant itunes be programed to do this?

currently if i format my computer and reinstall windows, even though im reloading all of my same music files back onto the exact same machine when i reconnect my ipod after the format it forces me to format my ipod, i think this is way unfair as its the same library, you can deauthorise the computer to stay within your computer count limits so maybe itunes 8 could have an option to disassociate itself from a library before you do the format that way when you connect the ipod to itunes after the format it sees the ipod is not associated with any library and lets you associate with the current library and begin synching without having to format the ipod.

just a few suggestions.

It would be extremely helpful if iTunes and iPods would continue to organize artists alphabetically but organize their albums by release date. Also, a “Favorite Artists” section (similar to the playlist section) would be nice on the iPod, possibly with them showing up in bold when you search by artist.

iTunes needs more speed in windows, it is far too slow and bloated. Apple should not be proud of the windows version of iTunes, it is a disgrace.

iTunes needs to support new Vista features such as fading when opening and closing, minimizing and maximizing, shadows and properly support 3D flip and live thumbnails.

iTunes needs to support media buttons found on most modern keyboards and notebooks

iTunes needs its own widget for Vista sidebar that works properly with it, because currently every iTunes widget available whether it be for the Vista sidebar or any other widget engine causes iTunes to have a hard time closing. So Apple needs to include there own which works properly.

iTunes interface used to be cool, easy to use, and looked good/clutter free. It has now become a ugly grey mess. Sure it may still look good on a Mac but on Windows iTunes looks like garbage. Look at the new Zune 2 software, it is fantastic so simple. I think its time that Apple will have to copy Microsofts work with iTunes 8.

All I can say is that if Apple does not make some drastic improvements to every part of iTunes then they are going to be in big trouble. Even Winamp with version 5.5, is beginning to become a nicer to use and looking media player and it supports the ipod.

I’d appreciate the ability to individually set the scheduling and updating of podcasts… for example one podcast i watch is weekly which is fine and one is daily updates… when i sync i want to be able to get the latest only of one and all missed daily episodes of the other.

Why don’t they just copy Windows media player? It’s far superior to iTunes.

Itunes is clunky, cumbersome and not at all user friendly.

The only reason reason I use iTunes is because you can’t use Windows media player with an iPod.

Ummmmm. How bout 64 bit OS support. Which should have been done back in version 6 at least. :)

Umm, Joel, may I remind you that iTunes is an Apple program and not a Windows one – you should consider yourself lucky you even have it at all on a Windows machine – using something like Vista you have no right to ask for retarded things like support for flip 3D (idea stolen from Mac), “gadget” support (again, stolen from Mac), or support for those retard-compliant media buttons that Windoze machines have for their users who are too retarded to execute those commands the normal way.

Get a life – then get a Mac like a REAL computer user. And how dare you even mention that waste of space Zune, which will be gone in a year anyways. You don’t have a clue.

I Totally Agree With GreenOne. iTunes 7 Is Nice, However I Would Like To See Some Improvements In The iTunes Music Store, And In Cover Flow Be Able To Flip Over The Artwork And Select The Song Like I Can On My iPod Touch. A Cool New UI Would Be Awesome And I Expect To See One. Maybe Tomorrow At MacWorld 2008? I Don’t Know But I Can’t Wait To See What Steve Jobs Has Up His Sleve Tomorrow Afternoon! I Know I’ll Be Watching!

GreenOne: The early alpha of Longhorn (vista’s codename) back in 2003 or so had early versions of the aero interface, and it even had a form of gadgets, which is a yahoo thing anyway called Konfabulator or something like that. All of this is not stolen from Apple. Also, on your comment about windows users being retarded, think about what Apple has built their userbase on: the fact that apple simplifies computer use. “It just works” right? Apple brought iTunes to Windows to get more users and publicity. I have an iPod and it’s awesome, but I hate the Mac OS, it seems cumbersome and hard to find certain things, not to mention there aren’t many games supported for it.

OK maybe I was a little harsh, but seriously. Yes Apple simplifies computer use – by having a machine that WORKS – the dock is down there. Point. Click. ITunes. You don’t need stupid buttons on your keyboard to do the things you should be smart enough to already know how to do (and just as easily as those buttons claim to be). If you’re that clueless then you shouldn’t even be allowed near a computer.

Joel asking for all that **** is like a snowboarder asking for poles.

I just want half point ratings… please pretty please… :)

With more and more homes having networks and servers it’s time iTunes is converted to a client server model. The current verison of iTunes is rubbish when it comes to sharing iTunes musicdatabases on a home network. I would love an iTunes server (that can run on a windows/mac server or pc) with a central music database. All PCs and Macs running iTunes should be able to connect to the iTunes server and use it’s central database. iTunes clients should rip Audio CD’s to the central database and ipods should be able to be synced from any iTunes client computer on the home network.

I also think it’s time that iTunes stores album art in the meta tags of the mp3 file, when you rip a CD. This aids other MP3 software (like Mediaportal) when it uses the itunes file directory.

Finally iTunes needs a good tool for moving the database from one PC to another (or to the iTunes server that I suggested above). Currently moving an iTunes database uses ugly hacks.

Hope somebody at Apple reads this….

Regards,

Luke

Overall, iTunes is great, but there are two things I’d like to see added.

1) Some kind of additional video section apart from Movies and TV. For example, I have a few 10, 20, or 30 second clips that aren’t of TV shows and I don’t want them in the movies section (I’d like to save it for actual feature length movies). Either give me the section in iTunes proper, or let me add it (like I would add a folder in Finder). Since the iPod Touch and iPhone have Youtube, maybe do something with that?

2)This is maybe not an iTunes issue but rather OS X. I cannot understand why notes that people create on their ipod can’t be synched with Apple’s Mail.app (as long as the user’s running Leopard). I think it’s kind of annoying to have note taking on both the Mac and the ipod, but to not be able to share the two – I mean, contacts are drawn from address book, schedules are drawn from iCal, why can’t notes be drawn from Mail?

I’ve got several things that I would really, really like itunes to do:

1. Allow me to store my music in a lossless format and auto-transcode on the fly when syncing to my ipod. It can do this for the shuffle so why not for other ipods and iphones?

2. Support flac.

3. Allow multiple entries for artist, album artist, composer and genre. Being forced to ignore or combine artists and composers when tagging makes for an incomplete or sloppy database.

4. Add in support for a date or year composed tag.

a kind of jukebox system is needed, so you can but your tracks in line to party foreksampel

I’m also need the automatic transcoding from ALAC to AAC when uploading to your iPod

And then support for more file formats like FLAC.

An be able to transcode any type of video to right size and codec to play on you iPod/iPhone

Would really like to see itues do the following: 1. Enque songs in a list (like mentioned before) 2. Just like I can do on my iTouch, when clicked on an album, one could browse the album and select a specific song, instead of start playing the first song on the album.

I wish you could play ipod games in itunes

I’d really like to be able to use iTUNES in a real multiroom environment.

so what do I mean. well I’f I’m running itunes in the living room listening to music in my library, I’d like to be able to listen to different music in a different room without having another mac in there, so how about being able t use the ipod touch as a wireless interface to itunes to be able to select music to play thro the airport express?

or at the very least, if sharing a library, how about getting remote access to the playlists I create on my ‘master’ machine – IE the one with the library attached?

oh, and if you can already do all of this can somebody point me in the right direction?

GreenOne: Wuaw, just close your mouth before you embarrass the rest of us apple users ;).. I don’t know if you havn’t looked at your own keyboard, but you also have media buttons!.. what Joel is talking about is that it isn’t supported in windows, the only thing you can use them for is the ****py windows media player.. (to all Windows users, use Gom Player or VLC).. I went from a Windows to a Mac, and i can understand that he would want the buttons to work. And you’re clearly not a power users! if you’re in photoshop editing a photo and you want to change song or pause, which do you think is the fastest: To Bring itunes to the front and clicking with your mouse on a button, or just simply press 1 button and keep on working!?!… Even if you’re in itunes is faster to press a button on the keyboard then to move your mouse over the next button and clicking.. Your simply missing your logical sense… But still great that youre on a Mac and i agree with your points on Microsoft steals.. Actually the whole Windows only exists because of apple. They used the first GUI in The “Macintosh” and Bill Gates stole the whole OS and changed a little in it.. The only good thing to come out of Microsoft is The Office suite..

Hum… iTunes needs to display the charge of the iPod (and the iPhone) on screen because we never know when this little thing is ready to play!

I would like to have separate locations for my media: one folder for Music, one for Video etc… which would allow me to store all my music on one ext HDD and all my video on another, the best part would be consolidating the library – this then not mixing the two but keeping them separate and up to date.

I would love to have even more sorting options. I do not understand if this can be done already but then I would like it to be done in a simpler fashion. Instead of just sorting songs by a specific colomn, particularily alphabetical order or a numbered ranking, I would want apple to include additional sorting on a specific field of listing your music. For example, when I listen to the Beatles, I would like it to play each song by album based on the year it was released, not by alphabetical artists which sort by album alphabeticaly.

Excuse me, I guess all I wanted to get across is the same idea that Chad had in a previous post. Great minds think alike.

I think a “now playing” screen is needed, and itunes to be a little lighter

Not sure if anyone has mentioned this yet but how about allowing Ipods to transfer music in to itunes?..that is all

I would also like to see a kind of an auto-tagger, like the one in Winamp. It’s very usefull with songs named like Track1, Track2, etc.

I got one more for Maintenance: -Better detection of duplications. Currently iTunes just show duplicated, so if you e.g. got 2000 duplicates, you still have to delete them manually. Would be better if it found, and deleted duplicates!

Here’s a list of major features iTunes deperately needs:

1) iPod shuffle-like loading control for iPods and iPhones. by this I mean being able to set a size limit and have it fill that space with randomply selected items based on rating, genre, artist, etc. Further, assign this space as a dynamic range, and allow one type of file to take priority over others. For example, 8GB iPod: let me set 2-6GB for music, 0-4GB for video, 0-2GB for photos, allways leave 0.5GB free, now, make applications have the highest priority, follwed by pdcasts, then video, then music. If I download a lot of video files, it will shrink my music available until I watch them. I have 150GB of stuff, most of it rated and tagged, and I do NOT have the time to manually build playlists each time I want to change what’s on my iPhone. I want this to be AUTOMATIC!

2) Better identification of duplicate files. Nuff siad.

3) Another option other than the simple mini-player. Something between that and full-blown iTunes, giving me access to rate and tag songs without having to open iTunes fully.

4) Individual rules for podcasts. I want to keep just the current episode of some, whether watched or not, and ALL eposides of others. I also want them to load more intelligently into the iPod with similar per-podcast controlls.

5) Easy way to force iTunes to attempt auto-tagging of songs. Sort by incomplete get-info and auto identify music.

6) Allow a docked iPod or iPhone to controll iTunes without bringing iTunes to the foreground.

7) intelligent backup: Let me back up ALL my stuff, only what’s downloaded, or somewhere inbetween. Also, tag files as having been backed up (and let me clear that) so I can do a full backup now, and then periodically only what’s new, but restore the whole set from DVD or hard disk one one shot later if I have a crash

8) Photo integration with Windows. Let iTunes control how, what, and when photos in my iPhone are copied to the PC, and let me manage them inside iTunes if I prefer. Better yet, why not just release iPhoto for Windoes? I’d be HAPPY to pay $39 for it!

9) Let me rip downloaded videos to DVD already!!!!!

10) Individual folder control, not just one big data store. I have several partitions, and I want video on one, music on another if I feel like it. Actually, I really want the video on an external HDD for portability since I cant rip to DVD… (fix that and I might not need this item)

11) store song ratings in the info header as well as the database. If I move my stuff to a new PC, I don’t want to have to reset all that data, and I may or may not want to copy the iTunes database (or it might get corrupt, that’s happened to me once already) This also helps if I load files into another player.

12) Support more than 1 Ipod/iPhone, etc independently, storing preferences for each device independently. Also, let me use that device on more than 1 machine, provided the username for iTunes is the same on both machines. Everytime I plug in at work, it askes me to erase my iPhone’s storage, and I can’t play what’s on my iPhone on the work PC’s speakers (headset). I don;t care if it lets me copy it to that machine or not (prefered if it would, but I know there’s legal issues with that), but I do want to be able to ACCESS that stuff, including watching video podcasts on my nice 20″ screen at work when I’m taking lunch!

GreenOne.

Speaking for the mac community, you are a ****ing retard; Apple may not have [i]had[/i] to have released iTunes on Windows-based PCs, but it should have at least done a bloody half decent job. You would **** at Microsoft for releasing hideously inferior products on OS X (such as WMP, Office to name a couple), and Windows users have the same license to do so. Jesus. Wake your****up from your little fanboy world; Apple are not perfect. I love my macs and everything, but they are expensive, unupgradeable unless you wanna get a mortgage for that mac pro, they are too noncey and annoying to work with, allowing very few developers to want to even bother making software for them. And before you **** about no viruses, stability, rant rant etc, I know that, but it doesn’t excuse their shortcomings. Good God. I know that’s an old post, but I was so incensed by seeing it! :D

I agreed with many comments here. iTunes needs to be more concern to windows users (don’t forget most ipod owners are still use MS Windows). On Windows, iTunes is REALLY slow and use loads of memory. I don’t know this happen on OS X since I don’t own mac. Make it lighter before some of us desperately need to switch to mediamonkey or winamp (WMP is light, but I simply don’t know how to use it).

Oh, and if you could do it. Please make iTunes in a modular design? That would make iTune lighter!

Scheduled dowloads – some of us still have off-peak quotas (for very good reasons) My family is very well trained in the use of scheduled downloads and we just can’t do it in iTunes. (We have 4 computers with teenagers on 2 of them and it is tough enough managing bandwidth thanks).

iTunes 8 should have sepearte icon for music videos under library. Add a photo organizer.

@xmz: iTunes on my mac with a huge library is painfully slow to use. I have plenty of RAM but it takes about 3-5 minutes before I can even start playing a song.

I just wish they would strip out some of the bloat, use a decent database backend and add some support for huge libraries.

I would love a decent duplicate finder but the current 3rd party software is not up to the task.

I loved the idea about having iTunes running as a server and letting client machines rip data to the library. That would be genius but I’m sure the RIAA wouldn’t like all that shared music!

(Bzzzzzzz)

Ps. My mac has media keys, just like PCs have :-)

I WOULD LOVE TO SEE iTUNES SUPPORTING .CLASS MEDIA FORMATS!!!

“iTunes 8 should have sepearte icon for music videos under library. Add a photo organizer.”

A photo organizer. Yeah. While we’re at it, why not a button that makes me Caramel Macchiattos, or one that activates a satellite to scratch my itch from outer space. Or how about a menu function that reverses the rotation of the earth?

I don’t understand why people want to continually clutter iTunes with things that it was never meant to do, when there are perfectly good programs out there that already do those things (iPhoto / Picasa). iTunes should stick to what it’s good at, and what it’s designed for. The more **** you pile in there the less smoothly the program will run (and it will hog more resources).

I have been iTunes user for 5 years now and one wish I have had for iTunes in a long time is to FIX the following iPod sync behavior:

When you connect iPod, iTunes pops up automatically (thanks to those background processes) and starts downloading podcasts. But, at the same time iTunes starts to SYNC old podcasts to the iPod. So, when you EJECT iPod the episodes of podcasts you actually have are OLD since the newer ones are still downloading. You will have OLD episodes even when all episodes have finished downloaded, unless you manually SYNC again just before EJECTing.

Apple tried to sort of fix this since last few iTunes versions by automatically SYNC-ing iPod once again right when you EJECT it. This however takes a long time if you have many podcasts (I sync about 20 to 30 podcasts daily and get around to listening at least some of them).

HERE’s THE WISH: Automatically sync a podcast as soon as each podcast finishes downloading. That way, iPod can be EJECTED instantaneously.

Well, I reckon you must be pretty upset at what we got from Steve Jobs in iTunes 8! This thing is incredibly slow, and is a resource hog of the highest order on Vista.

It takes forever to start, close and synch; the scrolling has so much lag it’s almost unusable; and the new grid display is absolutely painful to use.

I mean come on, this is the EIGHTH version of iTunes! Surely we could expect performance to remain the same, and certainly not go to ****.

There is no way I’m updating my iPhone’s firmware this week. I’ve been burned too many times at this point and will just wait and see for a while.

I’m amazed at the number of people who expect a piece of software to cook their breakfast as well. I want iTunes to play my music. Full stop. It does that very well, on both my iPod and my 1.8 GHZ G5, which is a ****ed sight slower machine than anything capable of running Windows Vista.

Silly me, I would like Itunes to know that the song is already on my ipod when I change that genre of the song. I can’t help it I go back and forth. Should all Aerosmith be in Rock or should some of it be in classic rock? I need, I need, I want, I want…

i want itunes to have a seperate section for music videos, not only that but i would also like to be able to edit music video tags in a group, instead of having to individual switch them over. as for on the the ipod, i would like to be able to delete certain music videos without having to individually change their tags to movies and then delete them.

i also want apple to make a color change option for itunes. staring at all that gray gets boring after a while.

itunes should also have support for deleting types of genre’s my list is over flowing and i can’t do anything about it.

oh and apple software update is really ****ing slow

thank you, that is all

What is a new iPod without a new version of iTunes? The answer to what is new in iTunes 8 is a short list. Apple basically used this revision of the popular music player to rearrange the interface, add new visualizations, while adding one new feature called Genius Playlists. This is a Step by Step Guide to What’s New in iTunes 8.

http://iuseapple.com/blog/apple-how-to/beginner-os-x/2008/09/14/step-by-step-guide-to-whats-new-in-itunes-8/

I’d like Apple to re-instate the IMPORT function, I copy my music library between my PC and MAC. With 7 didn’t have a problem and could preserve playcounts etc, with 8 gone….

I would also like a facility where you could set column widths instead go auto or guess work. Would make the interface more friendly.