found drama

James Duncan Davidson has a neat little post about how iTunes actually kind of sucks in the LAN environment. His three major points:

• When playing from a remote iTunes, play counts and last played information isn’t kept. This breaks the “Recently Played” and “Top 25 Most Played” smart playlists.
• It’d be nice to manage playlists from any of the computers that I connect up to my master copy of iTunes.
• In fact, it’d be nice not to have a concept of a master copy of iTunes. I want all of my music on all of my machines to sync up. It’d provide a great back up and I could buy music from any machine without having to remember to move it back to my main machine.

Which I can relate to. How many times have I looked at the play count of the shared “master” library and said this doesn’t seem right… Or else sharing from that library and having to jump onto VNC to make sure that the track actually gets tagged w/ the 5-star rating I want it to have.

I suppose I can see the logic behind why sharing libraries does none of the above. Keeps the punks at the office from incrementing my play counts, I guess… But if iTunes is able to authorize and de-authorize different computers from being able to play different “protected AAC” files then one ought to be able to authorize or de-authorize different client instances of iTunes from interacting with those finer points of the meta-data. Seems to be a perfectly reason solution to me.

Oh — and in the tradition of just tacking on some semi-related point at the end — I should be able to share my iPod library over the LAN, too. WTF?

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