Part two of an ongoing series about how Apple's music products really annoy me.
Look, Steve, iTunes isn't a piece of hi-fi hardware. It doesn't have a tape I need to change. Why on earth can't it remember where it is? It's absurd. I've got nearly 3,000 tracks in iTunes. Three thousand. iTunes forgetting where it is after I've been using it in in random-play shuffle-by-album mode for two days (so we're eighteen, maybe twenty, hours through the collection) is a big deal. I don't want iTunes to play any of the 300 odd tracks it's played recently again for a while. A bad interface decision was made there, I think.
Random play is really important to me. I've always worked my way through my music collection on the basis of whim and happenstance. Glancing across a set of shelves full of CDs and Vinyl, pulling things out for a look, noticing something you'd forgotten you had, or something you haven't played in ages is a kind of browsing which is very hard to replicate in an iTunes-type application. I get my browsing serendipity from random play, shuffling by album rather than song. I've never set any normal playlists up, just a single smart playlist which tells me what I've never played.
Soundcheck is supposed to stop me ever having to change the volume because one CD was mastered a lot quieter or louder than average. That sounds wonderful, but I find that instead of altering the volume once every so often for aberrant albums I have to alter the volume for every track in some albums (Foo Fighters' The colour and the shape is an example that sticks out) because those albums have some quiet tracks and some loud tracks. Why doesn't soundcheck normalise the entire album according to a peak level derived from the whole album. Surely 99.9999% of all albums are going to have been mastered to the same output level, leaving variations in peak level between tracks as an artistic choice of the recording artists?
I've got more to say about the iTunes/iPod, specifically about random play, smart playlists and interface design geared to adapative software.