And I share the frustration with the podcasts that get categorized as music. It’d be nice if you could just drag the offending podcast from music to podcasts, but that, alas, doesn’t appear to work.

The iPod is an awesome device, but it does have its shortcomings.

Also, am I the only one that is disgruntled that Apple wants my credit card # just to register at the iTunes store? I just want album art. I don’t plan to buy any songs, and if I do, I’ll surrender my card number then. It’s almost like Macy’s asking for your credit card number before you enter the store, even if you are just browsing. Sheesh!!!

Offline retailers aren’t even allowed to store your card number beyond the time required to process your transaction. Just look at all the trouble TJX Companies is in for their data breach.

Regards,
TM

Man, I only got the iPod and I have a gripe about it. It displays my podcasts under the Albums, Artists and Songs categories on the iPod. What?! That just doesn’t make sense to me. Podcasts are not music necessarily. When I simply want to go…

I have a couple of work-arounds if it helps:
– For a crappy song, make sure you apply a rating of 1 to any new song. When it comes on your iPod, you can click through to the rating and give it 0. Next time you think of it, delete everything with 0.

– Compilations: I’ve no problem with this, things that are marked compilation do not show up under artists, they’re under compilations. For misceleanous tracks, I put them in a compilation album called after the genre, e.g. pop.

– If you delete something from your hard drive (presumably because you aren’t using iTunes to organise your music?) How would it know?

I will add one to podcasts though: podcasts you download manually and those you are subscribed to seem to follow different rules. Things you download and mark as podcast (genre & album) aren’t considered podcasts. I can’t work out what the rules are.

1. Crappy ID3 tag management. This issue is widely covered on Hydrogenaudio.

2. “Forgetful” database.
If I manually delete or move file, iTunes has no clue about it and I’ll have to point the file manually. At the same time most usually store music in a few folders, so rescanning them and/or refreshing information on added files (have they been lost?) might help. Probably the worst “feature” of iTunes. Finding out that file is the same is no problem: binary stream comparison (skip tags) and fingerprinting are all well known techniques. This way we may easily manage our collection, even if it’s re-ripped to AAC instead of MP3.

3. Playlists.
Once again agree. MusicIP offers a wonderful mechanism of creating compilations “by mood” which is far superior to semi-intelligent “make it random”, “select the best” etc playlists. MusicIP is incredibly buggy and has a terrible UI though.

Creating smart playlist and smart per-genre (e.g. merge Goa Trance with Trance) sorting is a long topic but implementation of similar functionality is still possible with today’s technology.

Gracenote – has their data improved any the last few years? I remember it being awful, especially for soundtracks and classical. Yay to Musicbrainz.

iTunes doesn’t do anything intelligent with tags.
It’s a non-trivial problem though. There are quite a few bands with similar names so some fuzzy rules would get it wrong. I agree that all the trivial cases (and+&, punctuation, white space, ‘The’ present or absent should be dealt with automatically though.

It copes badly with compilation CDs. You end up with hundreds of artists listed (e.g. itunes puts a song by “Javis Cocker & Thom Yorke” in its own artist category.
The id3 format used for mp3 metadata was a real back-of-an-envelope job and we’re paying the price. I’ve heard it called ‘worst specification ever’ – obviously though this was from someone who doesn’t design websites for a living.

Check out the list of genres on the official id3 site. It’s hilarious.

And if you have one 4 minute song by an artist, it lists it as an album when you browse by album on your iPod
Pet peeve. A simple threshold of ‘don’t count an album if it has more than 3 tracks missing’ would clobber this.

Doesn’t metadata suck? Really. Unless it’s 100% managed end to end it’s another chore in our lives. Maybe some people have music collections with perfect tags but I’ve got about 10,000 mp3’s to reclassify :(

iTunes expects you to make your own playlists.
Check out MusicIP. Automagic playlists based on acoustic analysis. It’s spookily good sometimes and interestingly wrong other times.

iTunes thinks it owns your bandwidth.
Almost every app that downloads exhibits this problem. It’s only a few nice peer to peer apps that allow throttling back of the bandwidth usage.

iTunes thinks it owns all the audio on your computer, and always tries to put things into your music library.
It’s a simple preferences but I agree. Apple might have chosen the wrong default here and defaults matter a lot.

1. I was very disappointed that iTunes does not update songs loaded offline once online. I loaded songs offline assuming it would update. I was very surprised that it didn’t. It caused me some extra work. A few weeks later I talked with someone who encountered that same problem but didn’t realize the reason. I would think this would be an easy modification.
2. Compilations drive me crazy. Unfortunately, I have quite of few loaded on my ipod. When searching and playing by artist, what do you do? I know the workaround is to search and play by album, but what a pain!

A few of my other iTunes peeves:

+ iTunes won’t consider a song “played” until it hits the very end of the song. So skipping over a song during shuffled playback means it can come up again.

+ iTunes does no active management of the music on your drive. Delete a folder of music (manually) and iTunes has no clue about it, continues to show the songs as being available, and won’t remove them even if you go to play them.

+ It wants to play your music back alphabetically. Getting a playlist that actually plays your music randomly, without repeating songs until most of your stuff has been played, is a nightmare.