I would have to say that after downloading iTunes 9.0 that it is a serious upgrade. My favorite new feature is the new layout of the iTunes Store. It is much easier to navigate. And it has a more modern look to it. One area I would like to see an improvement is the rating system. I believe the rating system is overly inflated by teenagers or young college students. Almost everything has a 4 or 5 star rating. Too many times the review say that "the video is the best of all time". Everything cannot be the best of all time. One rating system I found that worked well was on the Fandango.com web site. This is the movie theatre web site for tickets, previews and showtimes. It lets you filter the ratings by different criteria of the rater. Such as by age group, if you have kids, and others. It is interesting how the reviews change with the filtering.
Maybe Apple could put a rater on hold for a while if they give too many high ratings. The other extreme is the one star of death rating where people are irritated about something with the iTunes store or Apple and they use the review as a complaint forum.
Anyways, back to iTunes9. The home sharing feature is good if you have a bunch of libraries as in teens in the same household. I wish they made backup of the system a bit better. Where everything is stored and not breaking the setup is too complex. Having an auto backup feature built into iTunes and archiving to another network hard drive would be the best. iTunes is so big now that a hard drive crash can wipe out a significant investment. Auto backup should be a key feature of iTunes. I know Time machine does this, but this is not available on Windows and older Macs. Plus I don't really want access to every version of every file I have ever created on my computer. I found a program written by a computer science student that lets you auto archive selected directories in the same tree structure as it is on your main drive. Simple, automatic, no compression, encryption, it just works. Should be part of iTunes too.
Another requested feature would be to have different user settings for the same library. It would be like multiple accounts on the same computer. The library is the same but each users settings are stored in their seperate area. Each person could do their own customization. I know Christina does not like a bunch of the songs on my library and we share libraries for easy backup. My worst iTunes experience was trying to merge two libraries which had some duplicate songs and some unique songs. I had to go by hand and find all of the duplicates. iTunes will list them. But you need to delete them one by one clicking visually. Sad.
iTunes is getting better each time but I wish Apple would allow for user input for requested features. Maybe they don't because of potential lawsuits if they use your idea.
1 comment:
Wait a minute - you're saying that Christina does not like all the songs you like? Are you serious? In our household I make sure that every song I have Robin likes, and I also never rip any CD's of Robin's that I don't like. I also make Robin listen to all my heavy metal. (Ha Ha - I think you can tell that I'm living in fantasy land!)
Stitch, you bring up excellent points. For me, I don't even consider not having Time Machine! Just the other day I was terrified that I had deleted some emails that I felt I needed for work purposes. And then I remembered that it was backed up, and Poof! I have the file restored! I admit it was great to see Time Machine in action. But I don't even consider those folks who run Windows, and that is a significant portion of the iTunes marketplace. You are so right - archiving would help. And not just purchased music - it takes forever to rip those CD's, and it would be horrifying to think you had to do that again!
And you are also right on the money with user settings on iTunes. I didn't even think of that. On the other hand, I'm usually the only one on iTunes in my household. Robin tells me she wants a song, and I go find it for her. But with kids in the house like you guys, it only makes sense!
You know, rating systems in general on the internet leave something to be desired. My biggest pet peeve are those who rant about something not working when in fact they don't know what they're doing!
Excellent points, Stitch!
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