So Apple has another really big show going on Tuesday the 9th. There’s talk of new MacBooks, iPod Touch ‘s, a fairly reliable rumour of a new Nano (which sounds pretty stupid, 4 generations and each one is radically different from the last – it better be worth it…) and even iTunes 8.
And I don’t want any of it. MacBooks will never be cheap enough for me to buy new, so I don’t care. Pictures of the new Nano make me wonder why they still call it a “nano”. And anything added to iTunes now will be for people that use the iTMS – which I won’t.
The iPod Touch, however, does have a foothold in my mind. And let me go into why.
Right now, for music in my living room I use a old laptop with iTunes on it and a IR remote so that I don’t have to stand over it to change songs. It works ok. Not great, but almost good enough. Almost.
I’ve been looking for a network music player to replace the setup. But everything has it’s shortcomings. Slim Devices has a lot of good hardware. There’s the Squeezebox Duet which puts a small black box next to the speakers and you control everything from a full colour controller. Of course, it costs $399. The new Squeezebox Boom is also very, very cool. Build in speakers with excellent sound – you can take it anywhere you can hit your WiFi signal. Like outside when you’re having a BBQ. That’s very cool. Only I have to search through 18,000 songs on that small display. Fun.
All of these play your music from software you need running on your computer. And this is where it really falls down. There are no dynamic playlists. Or song ratings.
What?!
Sure, you can create static playlists, but who the hell wants to do that any more? If I have a list of favourite songs and I add a album to my collection, which has a new favourite song, then I have to go through the web based interface to add it. That’s not cool. I should be able to just set it to 5 stars straight from the player and forget about it. I saw a plugin which gave song ratings, but that should be built in from the start. Core functionality should never be a plugin.
You can get SqueezeCenter to access your iTunes Library so it can access iTunes’ dynamic playlists but that just seems like a cludge and I find it a little distasteful.
Now, on the other end of things Apple has a small solution to my problem. With current versions of iTunes you can do two nifty things. You can play music from it over a network to a Airport Express with “AirTunes“. Goodbye laptop. And with a iPod Touch, or iPhone, you can use the iTunes Remote to control both iTunes, and AirTunes. So you get the little touch sensitive controller, the reduced clutter of a laptop free living room and the refined database capabilities of iTunes.
So what’s the problem? I hate iTunes.
iTunes is good at what it’s for, keeping you in line and directed to iTMS to spend, spend, spend. But it’s not very open to “unsactioned” ideas. It would also mean that I would have to keep a Windows or Mac machine running as my server when I’d prefer Ubuntu, where possible.
There’s a ray of light in all of this. Dim, dirty, but it’s there. When I picked up my Drobo I was faced with a choice. Run it on Linux or XP with a upper limit of 2TB (which sounds like a lot right now) or run it on Vista or OSX for up to 16TB. Vista is not an option so I picked up a older PowerMac running 10.5 for fairly cheap.
Sooooo…… I mean, it’s already got iTunes on it, right?
I’ve started to think about how all this would work. Headless PowerMac in the basement running iTunes, Airport Express plugged into the wall and the stereo and iPod Touch controlling it all from where ever I want. Nice. Hell, I even get an iPod to carry to work with me.
Wait…. how would I sync the iPod? I don’t want to have to go down under the stairs to put the iPod in the dock just to sync songs and ratings. That would be stupid. My laptop is running Ubuntu, and even if it was capable of running iTunes that means the rating changes still wouldn’t end up on the computer in the basement.
Which finally brings me around to what I really want from Apple: Wireless sync for the iPod Touch. Take a closer look at the Airport Express – it has a usb port for printing. I’m betting that could also be used to charge the Touch, and if the Touch won’t sync itself over WiFi, why can’t the Airport Express act as a bridge between the PowerMac and the iPod?
It would be so neat, so clean in design, so Apple.
They’ll never do it.
