iTunes 7.0 Annoyances

The first time I saw iTunes 7 I was quite impressed. Device management feels more integrated: it's much easier to see which of your sources is an iPod or CD than it used to be in the last major version, and there's a lot more detail about managing your iPod than there used to be.

The downside to this is that your Library is over-managed. I want to have a library called 'Library', not 'Music', thanks. Aside from anything else, most of my library is spoken-word: audiobooks, radio plays and serials, podcasts etc. It was quite disconcerting to have all this suddenly dumped into Music, and find it's much, much harder to see what's on your iPod.

I actually took the trouble to visit an Apple Retail Store recently (I'm in Ipswich, UK, so that means the easiest one to get to is in London, so it took me the better part of three hours in travel there and back) at least partly in order to go to a presentation on iPod/iTunes, which I naively thought might give me some tips on moving up one major version, after all there are no books available yet on 7.0.

It wasn't a completely wasted trip, as I also picked up a Belkin Stereo Voice Recorder and had the chance to test it immediately and see it works with my nano, but the presentation was an utter waste of time. No reflection on the nice lady giving the talk, but it was essentially a slideshow reiterating all the things in the advert and playing clips. It was on the level of 'this is a pop song, and you can fit x many songs on your iPod' (plays pop song over the talk) 'and this is an audiobook about John F. Kennedy' (plays clip of audiobook about John F. Kennedy for five minutes). Yes, iTunes/iTunes Store/iPod are an amazing technical and marketing achievement, but I already knew that.

In fact, I went up to her and asked her a simple question after the talk, and she did not understand it. What I actually wanted to know is, 'how do I get a different view of my podcasts so that it's a listing of tracks rather than a listing of subscriptions?' She carefully explained that I use the Podcasts tab to manage my podcasts, and I actually thought 'maybe there's a context menu or view I didn't realise was there', which would actually be quite helpful. So I went home and checked--nope.

At the moment, I'm moving a long audiobook from cassette to my 4Gb nano (using high-quality stereo and compressing it later). This shouldn't be a huge problem; after every few tapes, take the nano upstairs and dump the contents into iTunes.

Right.

The iPod management that is now built into iTunes seems impressively detailed until you look at it. It now tells me what's synchronised but not where the space is going. The 'other' tab is getting bigger and bigger, and when I look at where that space is going in the Finder shell I see 4 16k files (contacts/calendar). If I try to look in iTunes, it tells me that the 'other' tab is taking up over 1Gb. My best guess is that I need to reclaim the blank space that was taken up by the rather large WAV files, but it's not obvious how to do that. I know it's not the files in the Voice Memos playlist, because I don't synchronise that.

It's probably possible to sort all this out eventually, but since they've put a lot of effort into device management, it's a Huge Nagging Pain to find that one cannot effectively use all this to find out what's on there, what's taking up the space, and which old-no-longer-available podcasts are throwing error messages because they became unavailable since I synched the iPod.

The whole feel of this is that they've spent a huge amount of time and effort sorting out the Store's integration, but management of your own content is lagging behind. This is probably true because it's a subsidised device (like a printer or mobile phone (they sell it cheaper than it would naturally be and make money on consumables/calls/songs).

I've ripped a lot of my audiobooks as MP3s, and I don't appreciate them being considered 'Music'. Even AAC audiobooks ripped by the user seem to need to be re-imported to turn up on the audiobook tab. What kind of content you have appears to be respected if it's a download from their Store, but it feels as if your own content (CD/cassette rips, radio recordings etc) has become a bit of an afterthought.

PS. If anyone has any constructive comments about useful things I'm missing, please tell me (Mac-only, thanks)! Particularly if I'm having a brain-free day and there's some Perfectly Obvious Thing I somehow failed to notice.