Following up on my post for things I’d like to see implemented in iTunes, I’ve decided to do a second part, with more things I’d like to see implemented in both iTunes and the iPod firmware.

Better Video Support

[firmware-only] Videos won’t show up in the iPod unless you have them in some playlist or if its type is “Music Video”. Native support to TV shows, downloaded clips and/or music videos is a must. If I spend some time getting the tags in place for my videos, the least I’d expect from the player is to use that information in a clever UI…

Genres become Tags

[iTunes & firmware] Genres right now represent useless information both in iTunes and the iPod. Music nowadays don’t belong to a unique genre and even thought you can specify genres separated by commas, that’s only useful for making Smart Playlists, not for browsing by genre in your iPod.

Let’s say you want to play anything that has a bit of “indie” flavor; you should be able to do Music | Genres | Indie, click “Play All” and sit back… Songs whose genre is “Alternative, Indie” would get played as well as songs with “Britpop, Indie” or “Indie, Punk”. That’s not the case with the current firmware…

Context Menu

[firmware-only] If having queue functionality built in iTunes would be great, having it in the iPod firmware would be awesome! Rockbox does this already, you go to the song you want to play next, press the “Select” button on the iPod and a context menu shows up…

From this menu, you should be able to select “Play Now”, “Play Next”, “Put In Queue”, “View its Lyrics”. Why stop there? What if I want to switch to a playlist that contains that song? but not until it finishes playing the current song, or the current playlist? That would give me a lot more of control over the disconnected iPod…

Smart Folders

[firmware-only] Say you have a playlist called Best of 1995. You know “Ironic” by Alanis Morissette was a hit that year. What’s the fastest way to find that song within that playlist? There’s no fastest way… In fact, there’s only one way: scroll thru’ the songs until you find it.

What if you could convert that Smart Playlist into a “Smart Folder”. One that you could browse by Artist, Genre, Year, etc, just like you can browse your entire collection right now…

The Smart Folders would be like sub-collections.

This would be extremely useful for huge collections of music, I have 4k songs and it’s already a pain to scroll the list of artists… I wish I could create a “Smart Folder” for each letter…

Context menus would be really useful here as well, you could “Select” a Smart Playlist (or a Smart Folder) and select to sort by artist name, song name, year, rating, etc.

Desynchronized Libraries

[iTunes-only] If you, like me, decided not to have your entire library synchronized and keep your music in the iPod only. You should know that there are tons of tools and functions iTunes hides from you… Just because you’re not using the library.

To begin, the “Convert Selection to iPod” is a powerful tool that lets you not only convert videos and rip CDs, but also split tracks, resample tracks and even switch formats (aac to mp3 for example). The “Join CD Tracks” is also useful for putting tracks together.

You can create folders to keep your playlist manageable, but only if your playlists are part of the library. You can burn a playlist to a CD, but only if that playlist is part of the library, you can even export your songs or an XML of a selection, but only if you’re operating in the library, not the iPod.

Sounds like a lot of missing integration for the player that’s supposed to be the “perfect match” to your iPod…

Music Playback on TV

[firmware-only] I don’t want to have to spend $100 in a dock to be able to listen music on my TV; I already spent $20 in a cable to watch my photos and videos, why can’t I play my music too?

Sure, you can select a playlist for a photo slideshow and listen to music while watching photos; but the music is played with Shuffle off, there’s no way to change the settings for what’s played during a slideshow.

The only way I can do this right now – and take note of this trick as it may come handy – is to start playing your music, it can be a playlist or an album, whatever, shuffled or not; then go to the main menu, select Photos | Slideshow Settings | Music, and make sure that “Now Playing” is selected. Now go back to Photos, select an album and start the slideshow in it. Voilá, you get your music on your TV the way you want it, and a slideshow of photos…

It’d be cool if this was supported natively, and in a prettier way.

Conclusion

You might say I should try other players like Songbird, or other firmwares like Rockbox. I’m not doing any of those because both require me to get the music out of my iPod and re-spend the time I already spent tagging it into the iTunesDB, which neither Songbird nor Rockbox can read at the moment…

So what I do is hope for the iTunes developers to stop adding stupid things like the support to the Nike+iPod thing and focus on what’s really useful for both the iTunes and the iPod firmware…

UPDATE: Digg this if you care…

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