A (gasp!) bad word about iTunes

My ancestors worried about keeping wild animals out of their caves, my Grandmother was born into a Willa Cather existence in the late Nineteenth Century, my Dad lived through the depression. My problem? iTunes does not shuffle my music library to my expectations.

Let me get my bona fides out first. I'm a long-tail guy, and I was celebrating the legal distribution of MP3s in July of 2003 (In a comment, Silence points out that Apple has a "new" service to sell MP3s). Furthermore, I'll call the iPod the singularly coolest product of my lifetime. Great hardware, cool design, form, function -- it has earned its success.

Software-wise, I have never been completely sold. Lileks considers himself part of the iPod army and last week cheered on criticism of Microsoft's stumbles with the Zune. At the risk of starting a flame war, I think some competition for Apple is long overdue. I'd like to see the company fix its software to be, say, 1/100th as good as its hardware.

Lileks mentions later, "I took a small amount of flak yesterday for linking to the Zune-installation page. I should have noted that it wasn’t so much the problems encountered, but the overall sense of Lame that flowed off those screengrabs." Sorry, James, the graphics on the installation screens is not up to your aesthetic standards? Did I mention the part about the cave and the wild animals, and our ancestors working 365 days a year?

I can't say how "cool" the iTunes install was, but years later, I am extremely disappointed in its look and feel. Maybe it's better on a Mac, but I run iTunes on a PC, with my library mounted on a shared network drive. I'll confess that I have probably brought on some performance problems with this setup, but it -- if I may borrow a word from Lileks's buddy’s review of the Zune install -- sucks.

iTunes takes a long time to load. If I plug in my shuffle to have it automatically launch, it's about a minute before I see a screen. I trust that it is doing something because the CPU and IO drain take the system down to glue and molasses.. Hey -- there's the friendly iTunes window, let's get to work.

If the network drive is unavailable, it will first delete every song on the shuffle, then try to load it full of new songs, then generate an error for each song. That, Mr. Lileks, is lame. I do this for a living and that is unacceptable for a general use consumer product. Whatever. Get the drive mapped, we've got tunes to load.

With the drive connected, the performance is so bad, and the feedback so ill-planned, that I have to open the shuffle, then click very deliberately the "Autofill" button. Very deliberately, because it will be minutes before the program acknowledges that I pressed a button. It just sits there. Now that I expect it, I go make coffee or work on another machine for a while. In a minute, it will start loading. and I can tell by the progress bar that it's working. Cool. (Hint to Apple programmers: it's called a "thread." Let the user know that you know he clicked the button and offer some indication that you are working on something that might take some time.)

Waaah, I know. But this seems too clunky to me for a consumer product. And WAY too clunky for a product that everybody loves. But once it's done it's done and my cool little shuffle is loaded with a random selection of tunes from library, life is good.

Life is sort of good. I have about 40 GB of tunes (a decent sized collection, but I know a lot of folks with much more). I get the same artists and the same songs almost all the time. When I reload the large iPod, the shuffle feature vends the same songs it did last time I loaded music. And the same songs it "randomly" puts on the shuffle. Out of 8000+ songs, there are some that show to have been played more than ten times, while thousands of tunes have never been played.

As a statistical arbitrary math problem, I know it is extremely difficult to write a true randomization algorithm. But that iTunes has not bothered to write an even decent one, when it detracts from the iPod experience, is shameful.

Let the flame fly. AM I nuts? I'm keeping the iPod, but I will not pay homage to the mighty Apple engineers until they produce software in the same league as the iPod.

Posted by jk at November 22, 2006 11:30 AM