I’ve been tooling around with iTunes, trying get my digital music organized in preparation for something I’ll euphemistically call my tax refund. Though I have to agree with general consensus that the iTunes interfaces kicks extreme backside, I still think there’s room for improvement.
Every band known to mankind has uttered the phrase “well, it’s really hard to categorize what we do” and lived to regret it. Fantasies of originality notwithstanding, no band is impervious to being peg-holed; sooner or later, everyone gets stuck into a category, even if they’re stuck there in solitude. The problem is that making this category meaningful requires some variety of Star-Trekian pseudo-category, existing in the subspace that exists between and intersects with other categories.
Last I checked, Gene Roddenberry wasn’t a part of the iTunes dev team.
If such a facility existed in iTunes, it’d allow you to do really neat stuff. Right now, half my music is labeled pretty generically: Rock. But what if I could mix categories to better reflect the style of music? At a basic level, you should at least be able to assign multiple categories to a song, but why stop there? A more sophisticated system would allow you to say something like “this song is 20% rock and 80% punk”. Or better yet, you could take it to extremes, narrowing categories to comparisons to other bands – “this song is 20% Radiohead, 30% Alan Parsons Project, and 50% Pink Floyd”. At any time, you could queue up music to suit your current taste.
Still not enough?
Then what about augmenting Smart Playlists to generate playlists not only on static song data, such as song name, year or category, but also allow Smart Playlists to talk to other data sources? For example, wouldn’t it be cool to be able to tell iTunes to “queue up only songs that contain the names of cities in California or relate to California”, using MapPoint as a data source? This is something that might have been appropriate for my drive down to Silicon Valley. Or “queue up songs based on my current location?” Imagine iTunes being smart enough to queue up “Walking in Memphis” when you’re…walking in Memphis! Or “Walking on Sunshine” when your iPod detects you’re feeling especially happy? Talk about a soundtrack for life!
The final step would be to make the leap to tying iTunes to your life completely. We all have songs that trigger memories of particular times in our lives – if projects like My Life Bits succeed in allowing people to capture all digital assets the generate during their lifetime, wouldn’t it make sense to capture what music you were listening to at a certain point in your life? Instant reminiscence!
Yeah, it’d be cool. But instead, here I sit, using single categories and dumb Smart Playlists like a sucker.
In one anecdote, Andy Cunningham recalled a trip to New York City. They arrived late and Steve, as usual, had to rearrange the furniture in the hotal room. He needed the furniture to be just right, as he could never stand the way hotel rooms were arranged. And he needed a big bowl of strawberries. With whipped cream. On the side. And a baby grand piano (despite not being able to play the piano). And some flowers of a variety he couldn’t agree on with Andy, not that it mattered, given that it was the middle of winter in NYC and nearly midnight.