{"id":153,"date":"2010-04-22T22:53:27","date_gmt":"2010-04-23T04:53:27","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.planetmanuel.com\/dirk\/?p=153"},"modified":"2010-09-19T09:36:17","modified_gmt":"2010-09-19T15:36:17","slug":"itunes-what-a-crappy-bit-of-software-ii-the-sql","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.planetmanuel.com\/dirk\/itunes-what-a-crappy-bit-of-software-ii-the-sql\/","title":{"rendered":"iTunes: What a crappy bit of software II – The SQL"},"content":{"rendered":"

After three or four years of pretty much daily usage, I finally ran out of space on my first iPod. This was one of the old (but not oldest) 60gb models, and I’d already taken the precaution of not ripping all<\/em> of my CDs to it – leaving off dozens of Zappa<\/strong> bootlegs, but recently I’d run out off space and had to start removing stuff I just don’t listen to that often, such as all of my Orb<\/strong> CDs, and my early Stone Roses<\/strong> B-sides. But then of course I’d get a real hankering to listen to something that I didn’t have on my iPod. Given that I’m due to spend a good chunk of this summer on the road, I wanted to have all<\/em> of my music at my fingertip. So when I saw Amex were doing a 40% off promo, I ordered myself one of the 6th-or-7th generation iPods with a whopping 160gb.<\/p>\n

And it’s a really nice piece of kit. Apart from having a much better screen, they’ve actually built some decent functionality into the newer iPods. I really<\/span> like the cover flow. I know this has been in iTunes for a while, and on the Nanos and iPhones, but for me this is new on the iPod, and it’s pretty cool. Especially as I have all of the original CDs stuffed in a cupboard and so never normally get the chance to flip through them any more. Apple have also added Genius to the iPod, but as I almost never use this on iTunes, I can’t see myself using it on my iPod either. Probably because I have a bad habit of burning mix CDs for friends, agonizing for hours over song choice and sequencing, and therefore think I can do a much better job of deciding what goes together than Apple can.<\/p>\n

I also see that the ‘now playing’ screen also shows your rating, which is actually something I’ve been asking for<\/a> for a couple years (as I tend to use my ratings to filter stuff off my iPod (I don’t synch anything with a one-star rating to my iPod, and I only synch my 5-star ratings to my Blackberry) and like to see what I’ve rated and what I haven’t. So on the off chance that someone at Apple is actually paying attention, here’s a couple of other things I want fixed.<\/p>\n

Firstly, is it really that difficult to provide an ‘advanced smart playlist’ editor (smart<\/em>?? I’ll<\/span> be the judge of that<\/span>, thank you) let you use SQL statements? I’d like to be able to set up a smart playlist that (for example) selects 80 of my highest-rated tunes at random, and then mixes in the 20 songs I’ve not listened to for the longest time, just for the sake of variety. I know I could write some SQL to do this (you’d need a JOIN, in case you’re wondering…), but it’s impossible with the current form-based ‘smart’ playlist editor. Admittedly, most people aren’t as technically-capable as me and some of the the people I went to college with (you know who you are), but for those of us who possess a binary watch and a hex keypad, it would be a real boon.<\/p>\n

And on the subject of playlists (especially the ‘smart’ rating-based ones), I like to shuffle the songs when I play a playlist. But this means setting the iPod-wide shuffle on, and then playing the playlist, and then remembering to set it off again before I play another album. Why can’t I choose to shuffle only the playlist when I play it, and leave the iPod-wide setting alone? Where’s the ease of use, huh?<\/p>\n

Now, onto the things that burn my ass. Firstly, why does iTunes take some 219,000 Meg of memory?? That’s freaking ridiculous. Sure, I’ve got 2 Gig of memory, but to have to hand over one eighth of what I have to a single program is flat out unreasonable. Sure, it’s storing a lot of info there, but aren’t these Apple people supposed to be really clever? Couldn’t they just have an SQL database on the back-end (would help with my advanced smart playlists…) an in-memory cache, and some decent code? If I’d turned in this type of crap bloatware as a piece of coursework when I was doing my Computer Science degree I would have been laughed out of the lab. Probably because the lab machines only had about 16k of memory in those days, but even so…<\/p>\n

Also, although the ability to download the cover art is great, I take great exception to the fact that you need an iTunes Store account to do this (hell, I have the software, isn’t that enough?). Sure, I could cut and paste the images from Amazon, but with 1,000 albums, that would take a while. I know Apple just see iTunes as a gateway drug to their store, but what if I don’t want to use their damn store? (And in 3 or 4 years of iPod ownership I’ve not bought a single track from the iTunes Store, so nanny nanny boo boo to Apple!) Worse, you need a credit card (or gift card) in order to sign up for the iTunes Store. I just bought an iPod (Nano) for my 9 year old daughter, and wanted to get the cover art downloaded (otherwise, where’s the fun in the cover flow? – look! a grey square with a note in it; look! another one!). But to download that I need to get her an iTunes Store account, and to do that I need to enter my credit card details, and I’m sure as hell not doing that<\/span>, or else I’ll end up with charges for Hannah Montana downloads all over my credit card statement before I could say “Miley who?”. If Microsoft had pulled this stunt with Media Player the world would be up in arms, crying foul. But somehow it’s OK for Apple to do it? Well not on my dime, Mr. Jobs!<\/p>\n

Finally (and I know I’ve complained about this before), why can you not include a single song in more than one album? What about compilation albums, or singles \/ EPs that contain songs that are also on the album? Why do I need to have multiple copies of the songs, or remove them from some albums?? Again, if you had an SQL database, you could do this very easily. You just need a couple of index tables and Bob’s your unstable uncle. Apple really need to start thinking outside the (boring white plastic) box…<\/p>\n

That said, despite all of my bitching, the iPod is indeed a truly impressive piece of kit, and I wouldn’t do without it, now. Once I get to my hotel in ‘beautiful’ Port Allen, Louisiana next week after my 4 hour drive, the first thing I’m going to do is plug in my iDock, slot my iPod into it, and spend 18’49” chilling out to A Huge Evergrowing Pulsating Brain That Rules From the Center of the Universe<\/em>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

After three or four years of pretty much daily usage, I finally ran out of space on my first iPod. This was one […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6,2],"tags":[30],"class_list":["post-153","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-life","category-music","tag-ipod"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.planetmanuel.com\/dirk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/153","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.planetmanuel.com\/dirk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.planetmanuel.com\/dirk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.planetmanuel.com\/dirk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.planetmanuel.com\/dirk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=153"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/www.planetmanuel.com\/dirk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/153\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":167,"href":"http:\/\/www.planetmanuel.com\/dirk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/153\/revisions\/167"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.planetmanuel.com\/dirk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=153"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.planetmanuel.com\/dirk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=153"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.planetmanuel.com\/dirk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=153"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}