Membranophonist’s Ramblings

I like listening to artists’ recordings in chronological order to follow the evolution of their sound. The ID3 (v2) specification supports the input of precise recording dates (and times, but even I’m not that particular), data which I’ve added to some MP3s using the only application I know of that supports extensive ID3 tags with a somewhat understandable interface, ID3-TagIt for Windows. Unfortunately, iTunes does not take the day and month into consideration when sorting albums by Year.

How iTunes sorts Grant Green’s albums by year and when they were actually recorded:

An artist’s sound can change significantly over a handful of months, a process I’d like to be able to follow. I know this is not of interest to a majority of music listeners, whose favorite artists usually release an album every year or two.

(Not the 5/4 song by Milcho Leviev on Billy Cobham’s “A Funky Thide of Sings”)

The pop-up menu would allow switching between Moods and Genres.

Comments on iTunes 7.

Visual

• The second the main window came to view, I noticed that iTunes 7 does not use the system theme alternate row color, neither Aqua (#edf3fe) or Graphite (#f0f0f0). The color itself (#f1f5fa) is more subtle than either one, so I’m okay with the change.
• Not a fan of the bottom button design.
• Not a fan of the scroll thumb look. The arrows are nice.
• I would much prefer a drop shadow to the reflection effect in the middle view. In addition to being more visually subtle, shadow depth could be used to indicate selected albums.

Interaction

• A Shift+Scroll wheel behavior in the Cover Flow view would be nice, perhaps jump 10 albums.
• I like the three-mode Album column and hope that such functionality becomes a part of the development frameworks for use in other software.
• Album covers are not pervasively treated as proxies for the album itself:
  • Covers do not have contextual menus for revealing the album folder in the Finder or opening the Info window for the entire album.
  • It is not possible to select multiple albums by Control-clicking on their covers in the middle view, which instead selects just the first track of each album.
  • The cover drag proxy icon is a generic iTunes document with the number of tracks badged rather than the album cover:
    
• The software still lacks the smarts to automatically relocate all the tracks of an album when iTunes loses track of them. If every track from an album is “missing” and I manually locate and fix the association for one, iTunes should automatically compare the track list to the file list in that folder and fix them!
• The Command-1 and Command-2 shortcuts were unbound from the main iTunes window and the Equalizer respectively, but not bound to anything in their place. The Keyboard Shortcuts list (accessible through the Help menu) still lists them as bound to the windows. Rather than rebinding them as they were pre-7.0, two alternatives make sense: the View switcher (consistent with the Finder) or to star ratings (consistent with iPhoto).
• The addition of Album Artist is great for jazz nerds; I can keep my Art Blakey and Art Blakey & The Jazz Messengers albums straight without having different artists displayed and creating multiple folders.
• Unless you have selected the “Don’t show this again” checkbox, the “Get Album Artwork” command should have ellipses at the end as it requires further user input to execute.
• The plain Album column is not good at handling identically named albums. The tracks from McCoy Tyner’s Illuminations are interleaved with those from the Santana & Alice Coltrane album of the same name.
  
  You get jazz nerd points if you know how McCoy Tyner and Alice Coltrane are connected without consulting a resource other than your brain.
• When in the middle view with the browser open, if you select a single track and then hide the browser, the track you selected is deselected and the view scrolls to the top. Annoying.
• “No/Yes” dialogs must die. If Microsoft’s use of them was the reason for their prevalence in iTunes, they should disappear soon seeing how the Windows 6.0 guidelines now recommend using verbs as labels (just like the Apple HIG).
  
  

Miscellaneous

• Still a crappy video manager.
• The Gapless Detect-O-Matic didn’t get Santana’s Caravanserai or Borboletta.
• As I might have said before, the reason I’m so critical of iTunes is because I use it a lot.

Assuming you have BPM numbers input for your music (iTunes BPM input tool), it would be cool if the Nike+ in-shoe sensor could use your footfalls to set a tempo around which to select music on your iPod. Go running, listen to Coltrane’s “Giant Steps”, and feel the burn! A leisurely stroll would pull up something like Sonny Clark’s “Cool Struttin’”.

This is all the more reason that tracks downloaded from the iTunes Music Store should have BPM metadata embedded; once input by those responsible for initially tagging the music, individual users don’t have to worry about it, be they runners or DJs.

Input CD tracks’ BPM can be submitted using Advanced -> Submit CD Track Names. I believe the CDDB does save and subsequently provide this data to those who look up the same album in the future.

The title of this post is a reference to a great Isley Brothers tune, “Footsteps in the Dark”, which was sampled by Ice Cube for “It Was A Good Day”

I was not aware of it until I saw the link at MacRumors, but hrmpf.com has more detailed information drawn from Apple patent filings for just such an idea.

An alternate visual music browsing interface.

Downbeat Music Browsing (748K PDF)

• The Genre bar would be hidden by default. Display could be toggled from the Edit menu (this and several other commands really belong in a View menu).
• The Genre bar would automatically expand to multiple rows and a vertical resize handle would appear above the artist section scroll bar if all genre titles could not fit in a single row. Ugly, but overflow menus are ugly and cumbersome.
• Multiple genres could be selected by Command- or Shift-clicking.
• The search bar would appear immediately above the Genre filter bar, but the background would be the blue-gray seen in Mail to visually differentiate it from the Genre bar.
• Adobe Illustrator does weird things when exporting to bitmaps and PDF.

I updated my iTunes visual browsing design for the new iTunes/iLife ‘06 look. No major changes, but the visual quality is significantly better and there are a few ideas shown that are not in the earlier versions.

iTunes Visual Browsing, Revision 3 [1.5MB PDF]

It would go against the commercial interest of encouraging people to buy the same music over and over, but one checkbox could make the iTunes Music Store substantially better.

This could be set as a global default in the account settings screen, with the checkbox displayed on each artist or genre page. If you had nothing in your library by an artist, it would be deactivated.

Somethin’ Else (available at Amazon or the iTMS) is a personal favorite and highly recommended.

These mockups are pretty self-explanatory.

I just got back from a few days in New York, where I was visiting a friend who is graduating from the New School’s jazz program. You can hear Nick’s trumpet playing at his site.

Using Wayfaring, I’ve created a map showing a few of the places we went.

I encountered several interaction design problems during the trip.

1. The parallax of the touch screen-based MTA card machines is too high, leading to mistakes when targeting small buttons such as the numbers on the screen that allows the input of arbitrary monetary values.
2. The need to select the screen language every time a subway card is filled could be removed by encoding the selected language preference on the card itself. A means of changing the language would be provided, but the step would no longer be required every time money was added.
3. More broadly, having to take different trains for the airport and the subway is just stupid. In Boston, the Blue T line takes you directly to Logan airport for a standard subway fare. The AirTrain to JFK is $5 each way. The trains are nice and have pretty good maps and clear announcements, but why a separate train system? I’m guessing it has to do with jurisdictional boundaries between the Port Authority (which manages the airport) and the state (which manages the subway).

Many songs have separate composers and lyricists, from Tin Pan Alley songs by Richard Rodgers & Lorenz Hart to hip-hop collaborations between DJs and MCs. That said, there are also many singer/songwriter types, so using text strings from the Composer and Artist fields to auto-complete the Lyricist string (and vice versa) would be sensible.