I used to love iTunes when I first discovered MP3s. It was quick, easy to use, and all of my beautiful, prized tracks sat in it so precise and ready to play with my eardrums. It was amazing. I would spend hours perfecting all the track data on my songs, like a weird compulsive habit I couldn’t stop because I loved being inside Apple’s music utopia. Now I hate the damn thing.
Over the years iTunes has become the least user friendly interface of any app Apple makes, which is tragic because it could be so much better. Apple will announce a new version of iTunes in about 2 hours, and I don’t know every feature it’s going to have, but here are the things I want to see in the new iTunes:
- Simplified Interface – The iTunes interface is horrendous now that they’ve crammed it with features. Navigating between different stores, audio files, video files, and iBooks is clunky, and playing music on it is terrible too. They need to strip away the fat by getting rid of unnecessary features or even parse them out into different apps like on iOS.
- Better App Store – Yes, the App Store has more apps than any other mobile platform, but it needs some sprucing up. Users prefer to use the iOS App Store not just because it’s right there on their iPhones, but because the experience is better.
- Better Search – App discovery is terrible. Apple acquired Chomp, so we’re expecting them to start using those resources to make the experience of finding new apps better.
- Faster Experience – When you use an app like Rdio and then jump into iTunes it’s painful how slow Apple’s music app has become. I’m not just talking about it being slow because it takes a few seconds to load areas, but the amount of clicking you have to do to get to what you want takes longer than in Rdio which makes the software experience itself slow.
- Genius Radio – I have 154GB of music in my library, and a lot of times I don’t know what I want to listen to specifically. Genius Radio would give users a fresh experience with iTunes. iTunes needs something new for me to want to start using it again.
- Better Podcast Support – iTunes made podcasting popular, but they’ve always neglected it. It’s time for Apple to really embrace podcast support and make it more prominent.
- More File Support (.flac etc) – This might just be a pipe dream for me. Apple doesn’t sell .flac files in iTunes, so why should they support it? I dunno, because they want to be nice to their users maybe?
- The Death of Ping – It was a nice idea, but no one wants a separate social network just for music; they want to talk about music on Facebook or Twitter.
- Redesigned iTunes Store – The iTunes Store sells everything, and that’s the big problem with iTunes. Is iTunes a music app? Video app? Books? It’s not called “iMedia”, so why not create separate apps for each of those categories and give users the best experience possible when they want music, or movies, or books, rather than giving them a crappy experience with all of it mashed together?
Am I forgetting something? What do you guys want to see most in the new iTunes?
