[eggman]

OK, having spent a little time with iTunes 4, which I really love, I have a few thoughts about some features/bells & whistles that I'd like to see in iTunes 5... (which I'll forward to Apple).

1) Smart playlists: I'd love an option to specify something like "Track Name - is unique". If you have a lot of music by a given artist, you might have live and studio tracks of the same song... and maybe cover versions of it too. And you may not want them to appear togther in the same smart playlist.

I've actually had the experience of hearing 3 different versions of "Little Wing" within a few of hours playing in a smart list. (I have 17 different versions of this song in my library of 4000 tracks!)

It shouldn't be hard to implement a filter that looks to see whether the name of a prospective track being considered for addition to a smart playlist is already present in the playlist... and if so, not adding it!

2) The cover art window should be resizable and dynamically update like the embedded cover art subwindow.

3) A wishlist for the iTunes Music store that is browsable by your friends... who can purchase the track(s) as a gift for you. (Someone here mentioned gifts from the music store - and someone else mentioned a wish list. I think if these work together, like on Amazon, it would be great...)

4) The ability to select and listen to joined CD tracks as seperate as well as joined. It seems like ID3 tags are flexible enought to allow Apple to preserve information about the location of sub-tracks within a joined track. This gives best-of-both-worlds flexibility regarding preserving segues without artifacts when wanting to listen to (or burn) albums... or listening to the individual songs. Needless to say, such joined tracks would need to be re-ripped.

Having made these quibbling suggestions, I have to acknowledge that I think that iTunes is a particularly well designed app.

[MacGorilla]

I want to have some steak with iTunes 5...yummy...can't wait....

[Stuphalina]

Well, Id love more prefs for my iPod. I wigsh it would automatically ADD songs, but not remove. Any song in your music library that is not in the iPod is moved to it but nothing is removed if its not in the library. I have a 20g hard drive in my puter and a 20g iPod so obviously Im not keeping everything in my puter... Do I make sense?

[tdvorak]

I really like the new iTune 4, but would also like the ability to print out the art work downloaded with my music.
Also bookmarking favorite pages in the Buy Music section.

[misc]

Playlist groups where I can specify which playlists are under what group. Sort of like the Sharing playlist, where you can click the arrow and get all the playlists. For instance, I would like to have all my Beatles CD's in one Beatle master playlist. So if I click on the main Beatle playlist then it will display all the songs in the playlists that are contained. Yeah, thats about the only thing it's missing.

[ARENA]

Originally posted by misc:
Playlist groups where I can specify which playlists are under what group. Sort of like the Sharing playlist, where you can click the arrow and get all the playlists. For instance, I would like to have all my Beatles CD's in one Beatle master playlist. So if I click on the main Beatle playlist then it will display all the songs in the playlists that are contained. Yeah, thats about the only thing it's missing.

Exactly. I've been waiting for nested playlist for a long time.
It would be a great way to manage the music collection for people who only rip full albums like myself.

[Severed Hand of Skywalker]

Nested Folders and I can live without them. iTunes 4 is close to perfect.

What I REALLY would like is the name of the song to scroll in the dock or even better controls within the dock without having to click and hold.

[Nathan Adams]

Things I can think of....
hmmm

• the ability to have the small window version float above all other apps.
• and detailed options in printing off playlists
  (so not just every song, but things like listing each individual album, and so forth)

[kovacs]

Automatic downloads of album covers for all songs in your library ( ripped from CD )

Recording feature, basic cut and paste and fade in and fade out

Ability to save internet radio stream in source window and not in a playlist

Ability to strip the album cover from the file before sending it to the iPod, unless the next iPod has a nice color screen

Graphical equalizer just for the show ( a bigger one )

Advanced rules, for example must include all AAC files and songs from Bob Dylan remaining songs can be randomly choosen...

Limit size of advanced playlist to size of 5 Gb. iPod, 10 Gb iPod, ...instead of searching for the exact amount of Mb. your 5 GB. iPod can hold...

Can't think of anything else...

[mpmchugh]

1. Browse by Album Cover feature (ala mp3voodoo.

2. Option to store cover art in iTunes Database rather than in song files to keep file sizes down.

3. Seperate "Now Playing" album cover art window.

[Richyfp]

Originally posted by kovacs:
Limit size of advanced playlist to size of 5 Gb. iPod, 10 Gb iPod, ...instead of searching for the exact amount of Mb. your 5 GB. iPod can hold...

How's this?

[kovacs]

Yeah but the problem is the 5Gb. iPod is not really 5 Gb. it's 4,6 Gb. and the input box only accepts whole numbers ( 4, 5, ...)

[Scifience]

iTunes 4 is perfect. Don't change it.

[tikki]

When the window is in minimal mode, have it show album art if it is stretched out enough.

Favorite Streams list

Ability to play my iPods music on other macs if i plug it in.

[clebin]

I would like the ordering to be smarter...

I'd like to order albums chronologically, because it makes more sense than alphabetical. I also think a setting "is person's name" on an artist would be good, so they'd get ordered by surname. I've probably said both those before.

iTunes almost perfect though.

Chris

[Liquidity X]

All I want, is the ability to set a equalizer set via playlist, so if you organize via genera u dontl have to keep messing witht he equalizer. And for the vizulizer to work on multi displays.

[C.J. Moof]

The ability to select an album as an organizational unit, and not just songs. I'd like the ability to easily grab 10 entire albums at random and put them on the iPod.

Right now I get this done via an Applescript, but that script takes FAR longer than it should.

[zigzag]

Provide textual info on albums/songs/artists, like you'd see on an album cover or CD booklet, e.g. songwriter credits, date recorded, background, etc. I don't know how this would be implemented, but with the advent of downloaded music, it'll be harder to get this info. Maybe it could be integrated into the Music Store instead - every song and album could have a button linking to a page with background info. They already do this on those music kiosks at record stores.

[chris v]

I'd like to see a "playlist" column in the Library, so you could see which, if any playlists a song was in while browsing the overall library.

A "file name" column wouldn't be bad, either, since iTunes only displays the ID3 info, and you've got to get info to see what the name of the file itself is, and where it is on your hard-drive.

iSync should be able to sync iTunes libraries between authorized computers.

CV

[chris v]

Originally posted by zigzag:
Provide textual info on albums/songs/artists, like you'd see on an album cover or CD booklet, e.g. songwriter credits, date recorded, background, etc. I don't know how this would be implemented, but with the advent of downloaded music, it'll be harder to get this info. Maybe it could be integrated into the Music Store instead - every song and album could have a button linking to a page with background info. They already do this on those music kiosks at record stores.

Maybe they could strike some kind of deal that ties iTunes into the database at allmusic.com which seems pretty comprehensive.

CV

[libraryguy]

I think iTunes is close to perfection...I love it. The ONLY feature that I still want and that I think would make it perfect is the ability to print custome CD labels right from iTunes. Especiall now that they have album art...this seems like a no brainer...you could download an whole album...then print a custome label and album cover!! PLEASE Apple...I've been waiting for this feature since iTunes 1.0.

[Michaelm8000]

? Be able to automatically download song lyrics from the internet and embed them as meta data with each song. What would be so cool about this? You could search using song lyrics. We know song lyrics much better than song names, artists, anything.

? Be able to rate songs on the iTunes Store. You would not need to buy the music. But you could rate it right in the store and other would be able to see the user rating.

[Orion27]

Independent lables

[dettociao]

Originally posted by misc:
Playlist groups where I can specify which playlists are under what group. Sort of like the Sharing playlist, where you can click the arrow and get all the playlists. For instance, I would like to have all my Beatles CD's in one Beatle master playlist. So if I click on the main Beatle playlist then it will display all the songs in the playlists that are contained. Yeah, thats about the only thing it's missing.

That is the best idea I have ever heard. Ever.

[Webscreamer]

Originally posted by kovacs:
Automatic downloads of album covers for all songs in your library ( ripped from CD )

Yeah, this would be great!

I would like to see it have an Orange note for the icon too ;p Though I do dig the green!

Also, make the window corners look better and not as choppy(I know, small thing, but I like consistancy!)

[Webscreamer]

I don't really care too much, but on OS 10.1, are the iTunes 4 Close/minimize buttons pushed in the metal or are they like it was before 10.2.3?

[vmpaul]

Originally posted by tikki:

Favorite Streams list

I created a Playlist and just dragged my favorite streams from the main Library window to the Playlist. Is that what you're talking about?

My wishlist:

1) 'Global' or 'This Window Only' option for View Options. Like the Finder ability. I'm tired of having to go through each album Playlist I have and turning off the 'Comment' field and the others I don't care to see.

2) Nested Folders. Although you can create a Smart Playlist for a particular artist.

[tikki]

Originally posted by vmpaul:
I created a Playlist and just dragged my favorite streams from the main Library window to the Playlist. Is that what you're talking about?

Maybe. Basically up in the menu bar, there will be a section for Favorite Shared Libraries. When you find a guy who has the same tastes as you, good speeds, etc. you can just add a link to it so you can easily access it.

[Producer]

iWish Button on your .mac page that that links to a list of tracks you wish people to buy for you...

*enter all cam whores"

ah you know who you are

[Toyin]

1. The ability to have 'and or' statements in a smart playlist (ie songs that are R&B or Classic Rock or Classical and greater than 3 stars)

2. A new icon, I hate the green.

[codywalton]

- an option to show album artwork in minimized mode

- an orange note on the icon

- definately a "print playlist on cd cover" option.

[LeeG]

Definitely, minimized album cover - like what shows up in the lower left when you start the visualizer.


And/OR statements, and printable CD covers - these would rock, but I Hope apple is wary of bloatware...

Lee

[tikki]

Originally posted by LeeG:
And/OR statements, and printable CD covers - these would rock, but I Hope apple is wary of bloatware...

I think they are aware of it. Each iTunes update just has minor updates, and almost all of the time, we are thinking "wow! cool!" and start using the new ideas (song ratings, smart playlists, album art)

[mikemako]

1. disk-at-once
2. the ability to automatically create (and appropriately name) a playlist when an album is imported.

[tikki]

cd-text.

[Walker]

I'd like to see Top 40 charts from all music genres incorporated into iTunes. Not just the top downloads from iTunes music stores, but the top 40 songs across the nation. I think this would make it easier to find songs where you don't know the title or artist.

I suppose a feature like this will become realistic when when the iTunes music store is adopted by all artists.

lw

[ebolla]

Multiple libraries

being on a laptop i dont keep all my music on the main harddrive
i keep what i'm listening to that week on my ibook and i keep my big library on an external drive

its such a pain to keep both organized and at the same time - i end up just swapping out 2 different 'Music' folders in my home folder each time i switch from external drive to local drive

[Dace]

Skinning abilities...still waiting

At least skin the minimized version like WiMP does it.

[Sarah31]

plain and simple....the inclusion of an oggencoder. i know i can play oggs but i want to rip them.

barring that i want true vbr choice not a cap at 320. but i don't rip mp3's so that is not an issue. well it is if they cap vbr for oggs that way too.

[Nonsuch]

Originally posted by chris v:
A "file name" column wouldn't be bad, either, since iTunes only displays the ID3 info, and you've got to get info to see what the name of the file itself is, and where it is on your hard-drive.

Why would you want this? One of the best things about iTunes is that it eliminates the need to worry about that stuff; in fact, I would even say a filename view goes against iTune's philosophy of useability.

Originally posted by misc:
Playlist groups where I can specify which playlists are under what group. Sort of like the Sharing playlist, where you can click the arrow and get all the playlists. For instance, I would like to have all my Beatles CD's in one Beatle master playlist. So if I click on the main Beatle playlist then it will display all the songs in the playlists that are contained.

My big request: better library management tools for user accounts sharing a common music folder. When I add tracks to the library folder, I'd like it if a window popped up when my girlfriend started iTunes on her account, saying something like:

"User Nonsuch has added (n) tracks to the music folder. Would you like to add these tracks to your library?"

[Import] [Ignore] [Review Tracks]
[check] Make this the default action

On clicking Review Tracks, the user could be presented with the name and artist of all the new tracks, and could cherry-pick which tracks they wanted to add, add them all, or add none of them. That would eliminate pretty much all the headaches from dealing with one music collection and several user accounts.

Edited for clarity

[chris v]

Originally posted by Nonsuch:
Why would you want this? One of the best things about iTunes is that it eliminates the need to worry about that stuff; in fact, I would even say a filename view goes against iTune's philosophy of useability.

Mainly, just a hangover from spending three hours on Saturday going through my MP3 folder, trying to figure out which songs were which in my library. I had a whole slew of "01_song.mp3" and "track_01.mp3" files, and wasn'r sure what was what, and got real tired of having to select a song and do a command+i to see where on my hard-drive it was.

If it was a column like song, album and artist, you could uncheck it and not see that info most of the time, but it would be quicker when trying to track down a bunch of mp3 files than having to get info on all of them one by one.


Next feature request: Disk-at-once type burning for albums downloaded throught the Apple Music Store, with the original album gaps (or lack thereof) preserved so that the integrity of the original master album would remain intact.

CV

[Nonsuch]

Originally posted by chris v:
Mainly, just a hangover from spending three hours on Saturday going through my MP3 folder, trying to figure out which songs were which in my library. I had a whole slew of "01_song.mp3" and "track_01.mp3" files, and wasn'r sure what was what, and got real tired of having to select a song and do a command+i to see where on my hard-drive it was.

Check out Doug's iTunes scripts next time you need to do something like that. They have scripts that can weed out missing tracks or re-name them according to ID3 tags.

[chris v]

Originally posted by Nonsuch:
Check out Doug's iTunes scripts next time you need to do something like that. They have scripts that can weed out missing tracks or re-name them according to ID3 tags.

Thanks! Looks handy.

CV

[vmpaul]

Originally posted by Nonsuch:


My big request: better library management tools for user accounts sharing a common music folder. When I add tracks to the library folder, I'd like it if a window popped up when my girlfriend started iTunes on her account, saying something like:

"User Nonsuch has added (n) tracks to the music folder. Would you like to add these tracks to your library?"

[Import] [Ignore] [Review Tracks]
[check] Make this the default action

On clicking Review Tracks, the user could be presented with the name and artist of all the new tracks, and could cherry-pick which tracks they wanted to add, add them all, or add none of them. That would eliminate pretty much all the headaches from dealing with one music collection and several user accounts.

Edited for clarity

Now that's a cool idea. I have the same problem with Multople accounts.

[dfiler]

I second the motion for CD-TEXT.

Its really strange that CD burning programs don't always burn CD-TEXT info onto discs. There is no reason not to since the info is already available via tags and doesn't pose a single compatibility problem. The standard has been around forever and is perfectly reliable... why no CD-TEXT? It wouldn't require any change to the interface whatsoever, not a single pixel!

[lavar78]

I'd love to see those little "snap to" arrows used in the iTunes Music Store. If I'm looking at a playlist, it'd be cool to have a link directly to the artist (the same as browsing to that artist) or album (browsing to that album).

[dfiler]

Originally posted by tikki:
cd-text.

Tack another vote up for CD-TEXT
It doesn't even require a single pixel or character change in the interface.

Apple goes to all this trouble to manage mp3s with tagged meta-data but then discards all the info when burnt to disc. It makes no sense!

Why no CD-TEXT?

[dreilly1]

Originally posted by eggman:
4) The ability to select and listen to joined CD tracks as seperate as well as joined. It seems like ID3 tags are flexible enought to allow Apple to preserve information about the location of sub-tracks within a joined track. This gives best-of-both-worlds flexibility regarding preserving segues without artifacts when wanting to listen to (or burn) albums... or listening to the individual songs. Needless to say, such joined tracks would need to be re-ripped.

I'll second this request, as the artifacts between songs is one of the most annoying things about digital music for me. It's the main thing preventing me from getting an iPod at this point (my wife has one, though...) However, I'd go about it a different way; I always thought that joined tracks were the wrong way to solve the problem of gaps between tracks. LAME has had the ability to rip MP3 tracks with no gap for some time, and with the proper player (like mpg123), you can totally eliminate the gaps. Since iTunes incorporates its own encoder and player, it would seem to me that Apple can solve this problem if they put enough effort behind it.

An even easier solution would be to encode the songs normally, but have the player be intelligent enough to eliminate the gaps between songs. I believe WinAmp has a plugin to do this, although you wouldn't want to use it on an album which normally has gaps between songs, or on shuffle. I would be great to do this on a song-to-song or playlist-to-playlist basis. Again, this is something that is possible for Apple to do.

I've beat this horse to death every time the topic has come up, though, so I'll stop while I'm... er... ahead?

[[APi]TheMan]

Originally posted by dfiler:
Tack another vote up for CD-TEXT
It doesn't even require a single pixel or character change in the interface.

Apple goes to all this trouble to manage mp3s with tagged meta-data but then discards all the info when burnt to disc. It makes no sense!

I don't have a CD deck in my car that can understand CD text, but I think it's a great feature and I'd love to have the ability to do so.

Also, I'd really like the option to remove the Music Store from the list of playlists on the left. I have no interest in buying songs right now and it always confuses me.

[MrBS]

Smarter playlists would be very welcome.


Also, I'd really like to have sub genres. Like you could classify a song as Rock>Punk>Pop or Electronic>Techno>Jungle or Rock>Ska>ThirdWave or whatever. So then your smart playlists could be, lets say, all Rock. But if you wanted another playlist to be all first wave ska you could sort for that, without haveing to decide at import if you want the song to be part of the big playlist or part of the small playlist.


Also, as part of the first suggestion, it would be really nice if playlists could reference eachother. Like, "Is in Playlist RockNRoll and name does not contain (live)".

A distribution function would be kind of nice too, like to be able to say I want 20% of the songs to fit this category, 30% from this and 50% from blah.

But mainly they just need to let you do and AND ors. So you can say, select all songs above 2 stars and from artist A or artist B.

Just as a finishing touch, a "fill iPod" checkbox on the size constraint would help those trying to get the most out of their older iPods.

It would be nice if they allowed user-customizable fields too. Like let me specify a tag and my own values. iTunes could jsut keep it at the end of the comment field, and not display that part. So in iTunes I'd have a Party column, and a pull down for 0-10 or true/false or whatever I set the column to. If you looked at that ID3 tag somewhere else you'd just see it as xml in the comment field, <comment> wow this song is rockin' <Party>10</Party></comment>.

That would let you make some really cool and useful playlists. Same kind of thing they have in iPhoto, but they would need to work within the ID3 stuff.
~BS