People have been talking for a long time about how iTunes is not a good music manager, when compared to say, AmaroK or foobar2000. We just don't need music players anymore, we have monstrously huge libraries that need a fast, slick manager. So here's what I'd want an opinion on...<p>1. What's wrong with iTunes?
2. What would you like to see in an OS X music "manager"/player?
3. What is your current favorite app for doing the above on OS X?<p>(I am not asking this for either Windows or Linux because I believe people are pretty satisfied with their options on both these systems (AmaroK, foobar2000, Exaile etc.)
Support for classical music.<p>iTunes treats individual movements as "songs", not part of a complete piece of music. So, you can't, say, click on Dvorak's Piano Trio in F minor, you have to first create a temporary album to hold all three movements.<p>Also, the searching is messed up for classical music. The composer's name, for example, is sometimes under "artist", and sometimes in another column, and sometimes not there at all. A column for "composer" would fix that.<p>Those and a few other obvious and easy tune-ups would make iTunes usable for classical music.
I think iTunes on the Mac is pretty decent (compared to the Windows version, at any rate. God, have you tried doing any heavy I/O stuff in iTunes for Windows?).<p>I'd <i>love</i> the ability to have nested queries in Smart Playlists. The only "solution" at the moment involves having folders full of Smart Playlists for individual queries and then having another Smart Playlist to assemble that "level" of the query.<p>I'd also like the Genius Recommendation feature to be a bit better. The Genius Playlist feature is pretty solid at the moment (when it came out in iTunes 8, I was pretty much blown away), but the recommendation stuff is still nowhere near as accurate as what it's actually trying to emulate -- asking an expert, "hey, if I like this music, what else would I like?"<p>Edit: Oh, and more album art in Apple's databases. The Gracenote stuff isn't exactly fantastic. I know there's TuneUp and stuff like that, but Apple boasts that it's a complete feature built in to iTunes, when really, it's not that comprehensive in my experience. Who knows, maybe I just listen to obscure music.
Single biggest flaw, as far as I'm concerned, is the inability to script the folder hierarchy. If I want All albums folders to be prepended by the release year I should be able to do that.<p>Edit: Also, sometimes I have correctly named mp3's, but I haven't tagged them. Itunes gracefully renames my files to 'unknown' removing any trace to the correct name. And, if the files were in a folder prepended with the album year iTunes will kindly create a new folder to hold the files to leave the album art in the original folder. (okay, that last one is Windows only)
I know you didn't ask about Windows users, but assuming you are from Apple and have an ear there, please forward this message to the appropriate individual...<p>With my fairly large, multi-gigabyte library, iTunes often takes minutes to respond to user input. Sometimes during syncing it can take up to 30 minutes to respond to my input. Please performance-profile iTunes before frustrated and contractually-obligated-to-use-iTunes iPhone users slap you with a class-action lawsuit.
1. The biggest problem I say is its entirely closed nature. I don't mean simply closed source -- I've used tools such as Mediamonkey for Windows and have been relatively satisfied -- but entirely closed to plugins or user developed support. Specifically I refer to the inability to use/add anything to use FLAC, lyrics search, grabbing high quality album art ( a la allcdcovers.com ), social integration (mixtape, last.fm), 3rd party hardware syncing, and library visualization. Each of these could be solvable if only Apple allowed some sort of plugin integration<p>2. See suggestions above<p>3. Not using mac.
Better support for another MP3 players/mobile devices? Right now, if I use iTunes, I need to use an iPod or iPhone as my MP3 player. Other companies (e.g. Palm) that have tried to use iTunes to manage music have been shut down by Apple.
There is a lot that could be done regarding library management: It should be a lot faster, support bulk operations a lot better and implement fragmented libraries.<p>What I mean by that is that I use a MacBook with a 240GB hard disk for media stuff. I'd like to have a part of my library on the macbook (including stuff I listen to regularly, podcasts etc.) and a second part (my lib is around 200G) on an external HDD or AFP mount. At the moment I can only do that if I don't have iTunes manage my lib and then, still, the handling of missing files isn't too great.<p>IMO they should also get serious about supporting movies (as in: .avi, .mkv) - I'd love to use iTunes for that and helper apps demonstrate how much can be done here (epg guides etc.). Again, that'd require splitting my lib over various USB and AFP drives.<p>I really think there is demand for a well-made iTunes clone on the Mac, as long as it avoid feature creep: player software should manage and play music, I'll take care of getting it - keep your BitTorrent portal stuff to yourself, thank you.
I <i>really</i> like iTunes (on Windows) and don't know how it could be made better. It's perfect for the way I want to browse/listen to music. Am I alone in this?
Better video/media files support. It's such as hassle ripping my tv show or movies DVDs and getting it work with iTunes. The meta tags they do for tv seasons or movies don't even work that well. For example, trying to setup a 1 gig file with a movie poster always crashes iTunes for me and my tv shows can only be organized alphabetically.
I use Amarok for my music needs. The feature I enjoy most is the Now Playing playlist in a split window with my music library. I can add whole playlists, whole albums, whole discographies, or just individual songs.<p>Another feature I would like to see is some sort of network control... I am frequently on the couch with my laptop, and my desktop is playing music. Or my roommate wants to queue up a song. What I finally did was use Amarok and VNC (with a java web client) to let anyone log in and update the playlist...)
It's absurd that I can't search in both podcasts and my normal music library with one search field. I have a number of podcasts from live shows (like NPR's "Live Concerts From All Songs Considered"), and if I look up an artist ("Neko Case"), I'll only get tracks from within the "Podcasts" or "Music" folder (depending on which one I'm currently in). I can't see any reason why search shouldn't offer a global search of iTunes folders.
Music library is too locked to a single device.<p>If I put podcasts and music on my iPod with Rhythmbox from my work PC, iTunes will happily eradicate everything it doesn't know about as soon as I plug it in when I get home.<p>If I plug in my iPod while someone else is logged into my mac, iTunes immediately asks if it can wipe my iPod.<p>Maybe this protects the interests of the record industry, it sure isn't useful in any way to the end user.
iTunes on windows, perfect? When I click on a link to something on iTunes, it opens up another browser window and <i>then</i> opens up iTunes and leaves that orphaned browser window sitting around. Seriously, is that the best they can do?
Wrong with iTunes: Slowness, Storage of metadata in proprietary format, Easier to detect/remove dupes.<p>What I want? Something as fast and responsive as the original versions of winamp, with the search, playlist, podcast and sync functionality of iTunes.
It's single threaded. All my music is hosted on my NAS, which I connect to via wireless. iTunes fairly regularly freezes up for 15 seconds when I switch between playlists, or while it's attempting to add music to my library.