Comments on: iTunes 9 to take on Pandora, subscription services?

iTunes 8 introduces a couple of things that point toward a future in which Apple branches out beyond its buying model for media. Are these a harbinger of what will appear in iTunes 9?

[miroslodki]

I d'l tune 8.0 yesterday so cant comment on the Genius function

hope it works as advertised

I would love to see iTunes add new functionality to restrict the size of a play list - and randomize it as well

basically I want to create a new playlist to download to my 80 gig pod or my nano
based on amount of space I have/make available on the device without having to pick through my 150+ gig music library
make this function on any data field
ie artist, genre etc...

so that I can randomly allocate 5 gig to jazz, 20 gig to blues, 10 gig to opera, 20 gig to rock, 5 gig to Tea Party etc....


seems that iTunes usability was optimized for smaller hit based databases and has not kept pace with the library expansion of its user base

Now that would be GENIUS

[gregwsil]

You can already do this
1) tell your ipod to copy over specific playlists you are making
2) create a smart playlist that is with this criteria?. Genre is _________, last played is not in the last 30 days, limit to ______ gigabytes
3) tell your ipod to shuffle songs (in settings)

That is genius?.you are not.

[kelmon]

I certainly hope that iTunes can do what Pandora does since I haven't been able to use Pandora for the last few years since licensing restrictions stopped the service from broadcasting outside the US. It's a service that I miss but the new Genius function in iTunes appears to be working really well for me at the moment.

[dtorres312]

Humm, maybe we need to rethink the whole itunes thing, with statements like "so the more people that take part, the smarter it gets" it makes me wonder if Steve Jobs creates SkyNet.

[usualsuspect87]

is there any way to access pandora from itunes? It's great that i can access it from my iphone, but when i'm at home and want to hear things via my whole home airport express rigging, there doesn't seem to be a good way.... any clues???

I downloaded the new itunes last night, but with the extremely long Genius process, i wasn't able to try it out and went to sleep instead... still looking forward to it... i've got tons of album's that i've yet to listen to more than a few songs, this should give me a good opportunity to branch out with music i already have...

[professionaladventurer]

http://www.pandora.com/ from the web, not from itunes though that would be cool.

[hermantf]

If I understood you correctly, you want to have pandora running on your browser and play through your airport express. There is a way of doing this. Download and install the application "Airfoil," at http://rogueamoeba.com/airfoil/

This app "hijacks" the audio from other applications, such as Safari, and re-routes the audio to your airport express.

The only thing that bothers be about Airfoil is that there is about a 1 to 2 second latency or delay. While this doesn't matter most of the time, it is totally unusable when playing video games.

[dascha1]

Rethinking it all does make common sense. I mean, seniors and women are still holding out to a degree, and find it a lot easier to simply turn-on-the-switch to hear and then choose if they'd rather not listen to the ad: http://accessmusicnetwork.com

ps - study the history of music-on-demand to learn where things are headed! It's exciting things...

[vyper63]

Hey, here's a "Genius" idea - have iTunes allow for separate music and video folders. It's ridiculous to have a multimedia application in 2008 that doesn't understand basic file management techniques.

[gregwsil]

Hey Genuis... Did you ever think of putting the Album as VIDEO?

Its ridiculous to have a person in 2008 that has not fiddled with the application enough.

[Orengeman]

I would love a feature that allowed me to automatically rip my music at 2 different quality settings, one for playback at home and the other for playback/syncing with my ipod. As it stands, I rip all my music in apple lossless which means that most of my library won't fit on my ipod, but if I could also have 256k copies in a folder that was used just for ipod syncing (and that didn't show up in my regular library so that every track appeared twice) I could fit most of my music on my ipod and just keep it in my car, only having to bring it in to sync when I have new music to add to it. As it now stands, I spend too much time deciding what I want to add to the ipod and often find myself looking for an album or track to find that I didn't add it.

[catch23]

Windows Media Player will 'rerip' on the fly any song transferred to a portable device, to a per-device quality setting.
iTunes doesn't allow you to do this?

[gregwsil]

U can do this.... Just create a new library and switch between the two.

[andy1142]

i saw the genius bar and turned it off immediately. Apple already knows enough about me and gets enough of my money. I like Pandora and their service often plays me music i love and can't even buy on Itunes. I'm not a big fan of giving much information to a company that prides itself on its extremely proprietary devices and services. Pandora is great at what it does and there's something weird in me that make me want to reward those who were first to implement such a great service. I'll still buy the tracks from iTunes, I just prefer to support the Music Genome Project as well...

[LunaticSX]

"it seems like just a short hop to get to a full streaming, subscription-based approach ... Rumors have been around for ages that Apple will introduce a subscription service"

Based on no credible evidence whatsoever, just other stories like this one.

What is it with tech journalists and their obsession with subscription music?

"Didn't happen this time, but this must be an indicator it'll happen NEXT time!""

Is it just so they can finally say "Hah! We were right all along! Subscription music is the way to go!"? Or maybe so they can say "iTunes and iPods are finally getting a feature that the Zune has had all along"? Maybe they all had some favorite subscription service that died and they're longing for a come back?

Look, give it up. The market has spoken, and per-song purchasing has clearly won. The iTunes Music Store proved it, and Amazon's MP3 Store is reinforcing it. Amazon only sells DRM-free songs, and subscription music requires DRM, so there's no way you're going to see them adopt any kind of subscription plan.

Or do tech writers really WANT more DRM out there? Maybe just so they can complain about it?

Apple added movie rentals because it makes sense that you might only want to watch a movie once, and would be more willing to pay a fraction of the purchase price to do so.

Subscription music plans only make sense to a tiny percentage of the market, and Apple doesn't cater to fractional markets with their music offerings. (Otherwise they would have built a radio into iPods a long time ago. FWIW, the iPod Radio Remote is still available, and Apple made sure the new 4G Nanos and 120 GB Classic still include support for it, but it's not exactly on the best sellers list on the Apple Store website.)