Membranophonist’s Ramblings

With version 6 (more like 5.1), iTunes has reached the bloating point. The video integration is clumsy and playback performance is awful compared to QuickTime Player on the exact same hardware. Good thing you can pretty much make it disappear and use it as what it is: an audio player.

Video is not Audio

1. Why didn’t Apple create a more specialized info window for video? They added a “Video Kind” selection menu in the Options section, but the window is not otherwise redesigned for video.
   1. Episode and season numbers are not track numbers, a cast is not an artist, and a show is not an album.
   2. Why isn’t video information like resolution, codec, and frames per second displayed in the Summary section of the info window?
   3. Some would probably find it useful to store transcripts of videos in the Lyrics section so that they could use text searching (which still doesn’t search lyrics) to find quotes and build Smart Playlists, but it is disabled.
2. You can sort the thumbnail view any way you like as long as it is by name. Update: the video sorting order set in the list view is respected in thumbnail view, so you can sort them by other properties. So you can sort them by rating, but you can’t see the ratings in thumbnail view. Still a poor implementation.
3. You can assign ratings, but you can only see them in the list view.
4. The Title annotation set in QuickTime Player is not used as the Name in iTunes, which defaults to the movie file’s name.
5. Movies cannot be added by dropping them on either the Videos source list entry or the actual display area.
6. The nomenclature is wrong: the artwork pane reads “Selected Song” and the contextual menu “Show Song File” when a video is selected.

The video features feel tacked on; an afterthought. This comes as no surprise given that the application was designed for audio… It makes some sense to manage music videos in iTunes because they can be pretty cleanly placed within the existing organizational structure, but I don’t believe it works well with other video content. Television shows are organized by show/season/episode, movies by genre/title or director. What I want is a combination of the three following applications:

• MovieGallery
• iFlicks
• iVideo

No single application has the right combination of good visual design (MovieGallery & iVideo) and plentiful metadata (iFlicks), an understandable situation given that MovieGallery and iFlicks have only a single developer and Waterfall Software is a young and small company (whose next product I am looking forward to).

General iTunes Problems

Some of these have been around for a while, some arrived with version 5.

1. The Search Bar filters available cannot be modified. Comment and Lyrics (which ought to be indexed) would be particularly useful additions. Contextual menu commands or column header drag-and-drop would be two ways to add search filters. Removal could be handled similarly to standard toolbar buttons; Command-drag to remove or via the contextual menu.
2. Users should be able to drag browser groups (Genres, Artists, and Albums) to folders.
3. Users should be able to use Lyrics as Smart Playlist rules.
4. Users should be able to drag-and-drop playlists to export them in the default XML format.
5. The Smart Playlist editor window has little keyboard accessibility support; with full keyboard access on, I can only tab between the available text input boxes — no pop-up menus or checkboxes.
6. The Search field should provide a contextual menu so an iTunes query can easily be sent to Spotlight as a system-wide query. This is useful in Mail, so it might as well be available consistently. Before I forget, the Finder should also do this rather than displaying toolbar customization commands.
7. The tabbing order is different from Mail. Starting in the search field:

   Mail:

   1. Search field
   2. Source list
   3. Main content pane (message list)

   iTunes:

   1. Search field
   2. Main content pane (track list or left-most browser column)
   3. Source list
8. For those who do not like to take their hands off the keyboard, it would be nice if the search field supported a syntax similar to that of the system-wide Spotlight tool:
   • composer:Ravel
   • artist:Dolphy
   • youget:thepicture

   Showing the Search Bar when a field-filtered query is input wouldn’t make much sense, although I suppose the query could be automatically transformed if the user clicked on a filter.

9. I mocked up an iPhoto-inspired bezel controller for iTunes over a year ago. Since that time, QuickTime 7 has been released with such a controller, but the iTunes team seems not to have gotten the memo. Having to leave and then re-enter the fullscreen visualization mode to browse the active playlist is disruptive.
10. The contextual menu command should read “Copy Song (or Video) Info” - the simple “Copy” is ambiguous. Some people would logically assume that the command copies the audio or video content.
11. The Artwork image well in the multi-item info window should also present a Paste command in a contextual menu.