#iTunes ish (part 453).
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?
It pisses me off that my two teenage daughter’s computers can’t share the songs I PURCHASE from the Itunes Music Store. I am crazy in expecting this to be included? It’s like getting home as a kid with a Halloween costume only to discover too late that it “doesn’t include the mask!!!!!”
February 12th, 2005 at 5:20 pmI hear that. Library sharing on any LAN sub-net should be a given. Granted, I’ve seen a few weird things gum up the works (i.e., SP2 on my XP PC threw another layer or weird firewalling into the mix…) but outside of that the machines on said LAN shouldn’t have any problem doing this.
February 12th, 2005 at 5:31 pm[...] iTunes needs some work still in a couple of areas. A while back, I referenced a Davidson article on this same subject. Davidson talked a bunch about playlists, play counts, and getting all those things in sync across multiple devices. For the most part, I concur and for now will leave it at that (to avoid being redundant). What has occurred to me as a potential compromise (given the particular technical and/or legal challenges that complicate the above), let’s focus on the sync’ing aspect and turn our attention to … oh, let’s call them “remote directories”. If iTunes isn’t going to be smart enough to “client-in” to a remote instance of iTunes, pull from its shared library, and properly increment the counts and update ratings etc. (and don’t anyone mention AirPort Express or AirTunes or else I will flip out) let’s at least be able to have iTunes sync up and re-scan directories. The scenario as I see it is the following: [...]
November 16th, 2005 at 1:00 pm