[sunoxen]

It makes sense that Apple will be releasing a new iPod with iTunes 4 within the next couple of months. After getting all the hardware upgraded, and "out of the way," it seems logical that the next upgrade will be with the iPod and iTunes 4.

Firstly, we know that iTunes 4 will be available soon, as Steve said at Macworld about Library sharing over LAN. He said that it will come out "early" 2003.

Other features could be:

Basic CD cover building, play list printing.
AAC/Quicktime support.
Smarter Playlists.
Integration with possible iPod voice recording feature. (Basic editing, storing.)
XM radio support/timed recording. (USB receiver?)
Basic CD authoring/mixing. (like Jam)

I imagine they will release the new iPod at the same time with full AAC support and voice recording. AAC will be available across the iLife aps immediately. this will be .mp4's coming out party.

I also see them changing the form factor in line wth the new Powerbook Aluminum look. (It will be a lot tougher.)

I really don't see the use for a video iPod, but people might want them.

Hell, they might even include an optional Bluetooth headphones, but I don't see that for awhile.

Also, they will match the look to correspond to the new iLife apps. There will not be a "pause" button, etc...

So what do you think?

[Nebagakid]

MP4 SUPPORT (for iPod as well)
Rendezvous sharing.... (for iPhoto as well)
and one more thing..

[mishap]

i dont think we will see a new iPod or iTunes soon. Maybe iPod price drops....

iTunes does not need to be bloated with any extra features--it plays songs and makes cds. When Rendezvous support comes i think iTunes will still be 3.x

[Emotionally Fragile Luke]

Originally posted by sunoxen:

Smarter Playlists.

Hell, they might even include an optional Bluetooth headphones, but I don't see that for awhile.

So how would playlist get "Smarter"?

As for bluetooth headphones, um NO!

A Cell phones bluetooth single/low volume headphone battery lasts 2 hours tops. It also takes the battery life of your cellphone down at least 30%.

Now picture a high volume speaker with bass times 2.

Battery time, 2 minutes

I'd rather have a small cord thatnks.

I also can't picture your XM radio intigration. How would that work?

[OwlBoy]

iTunes already can play mp4 audio. Via quicktime. Oh so that means it already plays quicktime based audio.... and I think iMovie can import quicktime based audio, and I think that iPhoto can use quicktime based audio. and I think iCal has the no use for it, hmm, I'm running to far on your accross the board quote...

XM radio integration would never happen, and if it did, official recoding apps would never be made, too much red tape. XM on a computer might even be to much red tape.

Voice recoding on the iPod, that sounds like a winner, some people like to take notes that way. If it don't increase the price or change the form-factor, I'm all for it.

Bluetooth head phones, sweet idea, but I dunno... would be cool in it would be digital, not analog. But would it be to pricey / take too much power / be too bulky (oh wait, its in phone, nix the latter)?

CD cover buring, I dunno bout that, that ventures into making iTunes bloated. And playlist print outs: I think apple has apple scripts to make some in Appleworks with iTunes .

-Owl

[LeeG]

Agreed, CD covers IMO is a "we need to find new features to add" thing, and pushes itunes towards bloatware. Don't make it do more, make it do BETTER.

I'd like:
Rendezvous support- not a big deal to some of you, but I have a desktop and 2 laptops on a local net at home, and I want my music library available everywhere. Now, I do it with file sharing, but have to manually update the library at each computer, and playlists dont share, nor do song counts or ratings

Built in AAC support would rock, but must be incorporated into the iPod - HOPEFULLY a firmware upgrade will allow older pods to play mp4, if not, oh well. If so, It would greatly increase the functional space on my pod...

Is Itunes gonna integrate with the TIVO media thing? It would great to be able to surf through my library while sitting on the couch and pull up a song on the TV to play through the stereo - DIGITAL HUB!

I don't knwo if bluetooth is the way or not, but the only thing that I don't like about the ipod is the damn headphone wires - I believe tangling is considered a feature which apple implemented too well , lucky I usually use it in the car or hooked up to my home theater stereo


Lee

[Superchicken]

AAC DEFFINATELY, automatic importing into AAC, well maybe not automatic because some people might wanna p2p... although why would apple wanna support something ilegal?
AAC is deffinately something I want...
Rendevious... I told a friend about that option with the next iTunes rev and his jaw dropped... I deffinately want it!
What else... iPod no clues... I'd like to see em stay way from making iTunes full of iPod only features.
As far as wireless headphones right now it's to big of a battery waste... unless they made a fm or am tuner and then a reciver in the head phones... but like has been said... to much power.
I see it as more of a third party otpion.

Video iPod... everyone said it would happen... it won't. How often do you see people carrying around their fave movies? Or watching the same one ever day? I listen to much all the time! Why? Cause often you only need sight and touch. A video iPod would not sell dramatically well what would work much better is a digital camcorder slab that could play and take movies.. that's the ONLY thing I think apple would do in that direction. If you really want a portable DVD player, buy a used iBook or one of those crappy portable DVD players that're already on the market.
Honestly I think it's far TO much of a niche product and would not take off as well because with movies you need both sound and visual so the person can only reallyi do it on say a long flight or car ride if they're the passanger, or on the subway or bus. Most people do not spend huge amounts of time on any of these, and if they do and they want to watch video... they probably already have a laptop.

CD Lable making... keep dreaming. That'd be much more of an iPhoto option if anything and.. .that's not gona happen. It'd bloat and be one of those features for the small chunk that would use it and make the rest of us roll out eyes...

What else what else...?
Really iTunes is pretty much perfect I'd say... I'd love for the ability to edit my music a bit more, but ultimately that's more of a would be nice pipe dream. I acctually kinda see apple doing something like Logic express or something... but not to likely cause they havn't really rebranded logic as an apple project they just own emagic now...

iTunes is good now... there's not a huge reason to update it... I'd say it'll probably go to iTunes 3.5 and just be considered iTunes 3 in all documents. Apple's probably focusing their development time more to things like Safari, OS X in general and... wait... what ARE They putting all their developers on? I mean really... we just got iMovie iDVD and iPhoto... yeah iPhoto still needs a lota work, iMovie could use some speed from what I hear... but really... aside from iCal and iSync 2... and iChat 2... yeah I guess those are gona be the next three iApps to get the updating.

[Emotionally Fragile Luke]

All iTunes really needs is lower CPU usage and Rendevous support.

[Apple Pro Underwear]

Originally posted by Emotionally Fragile Luke:
All iTunes really needs is lower CPU usage and Rendevous support.

yup, perhaps more burning options?

[Parvulesco]

Originally posted by Superchic[k]en:

What else what else...?
Really iTunes is pretty much perfect I'd say... I'd love for the ability to edit my music a bit more, but ultimately that's more of a would be nice pipe dream. I acctually kinda see apple doing something like Logic express or something... but not to likely cause they havn't really rebranded logic as an apple project they just own emagic now...

Emagic makes a wide range of audio tools already, from Logic Platinum on the high end at $799 all the way down to MicroLogic AV at $79. So there already is a "Logic Express," as you put it.

Adding Logic functionality to iTunes is not going to happen. Simple editing such as splitting and joining MP3s (i.e. the kind of audio editing you can already do to MP3s with QuickTime Pro) I could see, but nothing beyond that--certainly nothing that Emagic might contribute will make it into iTunes.

[Emotionally Fragile Luke]

Originally posted by Apple Pro Underwear:
yup, perhaps more burning options?

Like how?

[Anomalous]

Originally posted by Emotionally Fragile Luke:
So how would playlist get "Smarter"?

Maybe more criteria available under "Limit to ___ songs selected by..." such as "Least Played." It is useful to know which of your files are not used much.

[Emotionally Fragile Luke]

Originally posted by Anomalous:
Maybe more criteria available under "Limit to ___ songs selected by..." such as "Least Played." It is useful to know which of your files are not used much.

Uh, you can already.

[Superchicken]

Yeah and more snappyness... I hear you can code in snappyness

[Producer]

Voice/Audio recording seems like the most obvioius enhancement...I hope they make it good enough that it can be used as a DAT replacement for Pro musicians..ie 48k 16 or 24 bit recording...and have the ability to input your own mike and pres

Wireless seems inevitable but after seeing the sony wireless model which is expenisive and bigger it seems like they will have to wait awhile until there is an integrated arm/bluetooth/802.11g chip...

[midwinter]

All I want iTunes to do right now is play playlists of playlists.

Cheers
Scott

[mishap]

Smarter Playlists = Most played songs this week only/this month only. something time related would be good.

[ARENA]

Nested playlists.
Real appearence widgets.

[I Bent My Wookiee]

Originally posted by mishap:
Smarter Playlists = Most played songs this week only/this month only. something time related would be good.

Holy cow people! Would you look at the smart playlists! You can already do those things!

[Nonsuch]

As is becoming clear in this thread, iTunes has matured into a nice utility app that handles most of the functionality most people seem to want. Therefore my proposed addition would be entirely frivolous: a Visualizations manager. iTunes' default visualizer could be improved with user-defined presets of the kind we're used to from screen savers: Color Range, Texture, Speed, Density, et cetera. Plus maybe a preview window allowing you to sample your extra visualizer modules before activating them.

Entirely frivolous, as I say, and probably something a lot of folks wouldn't want for fear of bloat. But hey, we're speculating here.

[Severed Hand of Skywalker]

Originally posted by Producer:
Voice/Audio recording seems like the most obvioius enhancement...I hope they make it good enough that it can be used as a DAT replacement for Pro musicians..ie 48k 16 or 24 bit recording...and have the ability to input your own mike and pres

What? How does an MP3 player grow into a DAT recorder? Please, their are pro apps for that and we sure as hell don't need that bloat in iTunes.

[libraryguy]

My only wish for iTunes 4 is Library sharing via Rendezvous (which we know is coming) and the ability to make custome CD labels. The CD labels thing seems like a no brainer...import library playlists directly to your new label. This would make CD creation with iTunes perfect. I don't know if we will see this feature soon though. They just released iDVD 3 and that doesn't include the option. However, more people are more likely to want to create CD labels than for DVDs so maybe they will add it. I can hope...guess we'll have to wait and see.

[MrBS]

Originally posted by I Bent My Wookiee:
Holy cow people! Would you look at the smart playlists! You can already do those things!

Yeah, but try to do something simple like all of artist a and artist b's songs over 2 stars.
~BS

[Sarc]

please make sure the iTunes Feedback Team gets you ideas:

*here*

[CarpetFluff]

There aren't many 'new' features I can think of to add but some of the features iTunes already has could be improved.

I'd like to see more attention paid to the 'source' pane where the library and playlists go. Firstly I'd like to close it altogether some times. Then I'd like the ability to group playlists together.

What I would most like though as an iPod owner is the ability to see exactly which songs are on my iPod when I view my main library, each song in the main library should get a tiny icon indicating that the track is also on my pod or it should change colour or something.

I often find myself adding tracks that are already there.

Finally I'd like to be able to split my main library up amongst more than one volume.

[CarpetFluff]

One other thing in relation to 'smarter' playlists. This is entirely possible, for instance with regards to 'most played' I would like the option to include only those tracks I directly click.

Otherwise your list fills up with not only the songs you play most often but also with whatever track follows etc

[C.J. Moof]

Besides the Rendezvous sharing I've been dying for since the last MWNY, I'd like to see iTunes be able to treat an album as it's smallest unit of music, instead of the song concept that it's tied to. In order to get 2 gigs of albums selected at random into my iPod, I'm using an Applescript that's PAINFULLY slow to build a list. It works, but since it runs my little Cube at 100%CPU for about 20 minutes to build the list, I rarely use it.

And if Apple would put manual control of the iPod backlight in the expected 40gig version, that would be swell too. Or maybe they could make it work as well as the indiglo backlighting on my Timex watch....

[chabig]

Originally posted by C.J. Moof:
And if Apple would put manual control of the iPod backlight in the expected 40gig version, that would be swell too. Or maybe they could make it work as well as the indiglo backlighting on my Timex watch....

What? It already has manual control. All you have to do it hold down the menu button for about two seconds and the backlight will come on just like your Timex watch. Do your stuff...when you're done the backlight will turn off automatically. Just like your indiglo backlight.

chris

[arekkusu]

Originally posted by OwlBoy:
iTunes already can play mp4 audio. Via quicktime. Oh so that means it already plays quicktime based audio....

Great. How about MIDI?


How about an open audio engine plugin system so I can get it to play & shuffle all my other music formats, like .MOD, .XM, .SPC, .NSF, .GYM, .SID, etc.


How about not using 10% of my CPU when scrolling the song title?

[biscool]

Wireless seems inevitable but after seeing the sony wireless model which is expenisive and bigger it seems like they will have to wait awhile until there is an integrated arm/bluetooth/802.11g chip

First off, the sony product you're referring to is a small, stand alone, linux server, not a "wireless" mp3 player. And what is the big deal about wireless ipods. It would cost more, drain more battery, be slower (bt 1mbs, 802.11b 11mbs, 802.11g 54mbs Firewire 400mbs, Firewire 800 800mbs), and more importantly you would still need to plug the ipod in to charge it. And what use for anyone have for bt on an ipod?

[Samanoske]

adjustable/changeable appearance would be good, like those fancy skins you can get for SoundJam or Audion ... I mean they have the best designers and only "one" skin, which sucks ...

[C.J. Moof]

Originally posted by chabig:
What? It already has manual control. All you have to do it hold down the menu button for about two seconds and the backlight will come on just like your Timex watch. Do your stuff...when you're done the backlight will turn off automatically. Just like your indiglo backlight.

chris

Well, I'll be.

I take back all those nasty things I said about the internet being useless.

[Severed Hand of Skywalker]

Originally posted by MrBS:
Yeah, but try to do something simple like all of artist a and artist b's songs over 2 stars.
~BS

Ya, I just tried it, works great.

[Amorya]

Originally posted by arekkusu:
Great. How about MIDI?

iTunes can play MIDI currently!

Amorya

[Sharky K.]

my request is just that iTunes uses a lot(!) less CPU.

and when they fixed that,...:
- ogg vorbis
- rendezvous
- acc

[chabig]

Originally posted by Severed Hand of Skywalker:
Ya, I just tried it, works great.

How did you do it? I thought the smart playlists could only do 'AND' but not 'OR'.

Chris

[Superchicken]

nooo don't put that link to the feature request! Half of these suggestsions would bloat iTunes into the stone age!
if you can do that to software.. not sure if you can... but anyway.

CD label creation... it sounds like there's like 2 people that might want that... uhh yeah I really hope it doesn't come in any time soon... I mean intigrating it would just be weird... not to mention it's a burnt disc it's not supposed to look pro unless you're like a recording artist and want to burn CDs all the time and then relabel em... either way that's not really iDVD or iTune's jobs... perhaps you should buy free hand and photoshop elements and put your's togeather that wayit probably would be pretty easy.... if CD label creation is easy... how do you do it anyway? I've seen labels you can put in.. honestly I don't think there's a big enough consumer demand and it'd confuse more people than anything.

As for the voice recording programs... I'd sooner see Apple make a stand alone program for this, IE make something look similar to the old music player.app with a record option and then you could edit the track it's pretty simple, heck you could almost do that with simple sound... I don't know how useful that'd be with iTunes though, you could make an option for storing from it into iTunes that'd be cool, kinda like how other apple apps work togeather. I think that'd be better than including it with iTunes, sounds more like a featured OS X app like mail or sherlock.

Acctually I would like to see more ability for catalouging, when I first started using iTunes I realliy wanted to be able to sort my ablums from like the first chronologically released one after the other.

IE sort by album and then by the order in which the CDs were released, most entries into the CCDB have times for the CDs it'd be cool if it just did that automatically.
(I'm still running 2 under OS 9 but I'll be going OS X only soon so here's hopin)
It'd be cool if you could also search by the year of the albums and stuff... just a thought.
It might make the interface a bit to clunky though, ultimately iTunes is a freakin awsome app and I hope that instead of trying to make it a one size fits all for audio app that they simply branch out more apps to complement it.

[OwlBoy]

iTUNES CAN ALREADY PLAY ANY AUDIO QUICKTIME / QUICKTIME PLAYER CAN

-Owl

[Targon]

Maybe iTunes/iPod could rectify some existing issues before it moves on to add new functions.

Issue 1) When a CD image of a continuous DJ set is made with Toast, iTunes WILL NOT recognize the track markers. Instead it sees the image as one long 80min track.

Issue 2) When extracting individual tracks from the above CD, iTunes WILL NOT sequentially play the tracks in an uninterrupted (zero second gaps) fashion. Instead, iTunes plays and it inserts a small but annoyingly noticeable pause in between tracks. Oddly, there is no setting for pauses between tracks :-(

So yeah, since 99% of my CD's are continuous mixes with more than 15 tracks these 2 issues need to be sorted before id can effectively use iPod/iTunes.

Laiterz

[jimsmac]

Originally posted by chabig:
How did you do it? I thought the smart playlists could only do 'AND' but not 'OR'.

Chris

I too am keen to know how you get a playlist with all songs from more than one artist that is of a certain rating.

As far as I can see, presently if you set the playlist to match all the conditions, and then have the first condition for Artist A, the second for Artist B, and the third for 2 stars or more, you get no songs in the playlist.

If you change the playlist to match any condition the playlist will contain all songs from Artist A, all songs from Artist B, and all songs in your library with 2 stars or more.

[mrchin]

The burning options I'd like for iTunes consist of only one. That would be to allow for crossfading between songs to be burned to the CD.

But that's not too important, as I use my iPod, and not CDs mostly, so I'd like crossfading as a new update to my iPod.

Also, as the iPod has SDRAM to store a couple songs ahead in order to save battery life, larger tracks eat that up since they cause the HD to spin constantly. Rather than having to use QT pro or other audio editing software to break up a file... It would be great if, when transferring your songs to the Pod, iTunes would break up any song over 10 minutes into multiple parts depending on total length, so that they would better use the battery. On th iPod, though, you'd still see what seemed to be the one track, but it would, in actuallity be the 2,3,4, or whatever number of pieces.

Here's a good one. How 'bout (since we don't really need color LCDs) but some peripheral that, when attached as a audio out from the ipod headphone jack, could plug into a system including a TV or projector, that would create a visualizer on that external display. My new business dream... Club Unix with DJ Sherlock spinnin' the scroll wheel on the 1s and 2s.

[MrBS]

Originally posted by Severed Hand of Skywalker:
Ya, I just tried it, works great.

I'd really like to know how you did that too.




...




~BS

[MrBS]

A couple other ways I'd like to see Smart Playlists get smarter would be basic grouping (addressed above), and access to total/max/min values for the library. Something like

(My rating is ***** AND playcount<.7total_play_count)
or
(My rating is **** AND playcount<.5total_play_count)

or something like

(My rating is ***** AND playcount<max_play_count-10)

It would also be nice if you could reference another playlist

In plalist "OtherList" AND song title DOES NOT CONTAIN (live)

And maybe it's just a pet peeve of mine, but I hate it when a program locks you into the secondary sort behavior. Right now if I have my entire library in a smart playlist and limit it to 50 songs by my rating, it will ALWAYS be the same 50 songs, as iTunes figures I've rated the 5 star song by the artist with a name starting with A higher than a 5 star song by an artist with a name starting with Z.

There are plenty of way Smart Playlists could get smarter.

~BS

[malbicho]

Originally posted by sunoxen:

Other features could be:

Basic CD cover building, play list printing.
AAC/Quicktime support.
Smarter Playlists.
Integration with possible iPod voice recording feature. (Basic editing, storing.)
XM radio support/timed recording. (USB receiver?)
Basic CD authoring/mixing. (like Jam)

i would really like to see broadcaster functions for icecast servers in the next iTunes release. And ogg-vorbis codec support too.

[Marook]

New features is nice, but could they just please fix the bugs first!

1: iTunes keep dropping the 'connection' to the files on disk, making the small '!' sign appear. The file did not move, or change, it's still where iTunes filed it. Why can't iTunes find those songs, that are in the path it thinks they are in??? Makes me wonder!



2: Gabs between songs while playing. How hard can it be? Come on Apple!
Strange thing is that Radio tracks has no problem with this!

[LeeG]

I may be wrong, but I thought you could get rid of gaps between songs by:

TURN on crossfading

SET crossfade to 0 Sec

No gaps.

I am at work so I can't test right now, but I thought that works. I have not been able to get the iPod to eliminate gaps though....


Lee

[SpeedRacer]

As i recall, iTunes was derived from SoundJam. Therefore the codebase for iTunes already has support for recording audio. In fact, if you look at the feature roll-out across iTunes, you can see clearly that Apple simply started off with a stripped-down version of SoundJam and added back in the features that were present already in SJ before Apple brought on the it's chief developer (ie: visualizer, equalizer, music-enhancer, etc).

Future features i'd love to see are:

• Support for AAC audio (obviously)
• Carry-over of iTunes effects to iPod/CD's (ie: cross-fades & EQ effects)
• Rendevous support (obviously)
• Performance optimization (iTunes 2 under OS 9 still runs faster than iTunes 3 on G3-based Macs)
• Zoom button that obeys the Dock
• Sub-category organization for playlists (ie: nested playlists by category)
• CD label creation - even if just an AppleScript from iPhoto->iTunes (I mean you're burning the CD's on a Mac... why should they look like something burned from the local Kazaa-meister?)

And for the iPod...

• Just make it recordable with a firmware and a new Firewire mic

[SpeedRacer]

Originally posted by CarpetFluff:

I often find myself adding tracks that are already there.

If you drag over to your iPod tracks that are already there, it will simply skip over them and only copy over the ones that are not on the iPod already. I used to do manually drag over as well, but Smart Playlists greatly reduce the need for this.

Speed

[SpeedRacer]

Originally posted by jimsmac:
I too am keen to know how you get a playlist with all songs from more than one artist that is of a certain rating.

As far as I can see, presently if you set the playlist to match all the conditions, and then have the first condition for Artist A, the second for Artist B, and the third for 2 stars or more, you get no songs in the playlist.

If you change the playlist to match any condition the playlist will contain all songs from Artist A, all songs from Artist B, and all songs in your library with 2 stars or more.

Jimsmac... you'd need something common across both artists. Telling a SP to match ALL and having the artist have both Artist X and Artist Y is going to create SP that looks for songs with BOTH artists in it's tags. You could do this with a tag that contains ANY, but then you're SOL when you add in the "above X rating" criteria.

What you *really* need to do (if you really want to get technical) is to create a SP that contains only the common characters across both lists of songs you're looking to play. IOW, to create a playlist that features songs from both "The Beatles" and "The Beatnuts" above a rating of "2", you could create a SP that matches ALL conditions of an artist that contains "The Beat" and rating above "1".

If that didn't work you could look for commonalities or differences in any of the other tags as well (ex: the "Comment" field allows a good deal of customization to SP's that would otherwise not be possible)

There's a good deal of variability with SP's, it's just not immediately apparent from looking at the initial options.

HTH!

Speed

[dfiler]

At the top of my lists for new features is:

CD-Text Support

CD-text is like MP3 tags for WAV CDs. Many home and car CD players are able to display artist, track, genre, album, composer, arranger... if only they were encoded into the disc.

There doesn't even need to be any form of user interface for this feature at all. There is no reason to turn it off since CD-text discs play perfectly in all CD players. Its simply mind boggling that the recording industry hasn't embraced this standard. The major recording labels deserve to go out of business! But simply because they've failed to improve their product in 10 years simply means its time for apple to step in. I might even copy all my old CDs with zero quality loss if I were able to reburn the originals with CD-Text info. That way, my 400 disc changer would properly label all its contained discs, allowing for a wealth of playback and search criteria.

There is simply no reason to not write the CD-Text info. The standard has been around for nearly a decade!