Dear iTunes

I love you. I truly do. I've used a wide variety of players over the past eight years: MacAMP (later became MacAST - don't ask), SoundApp, SoundJam MP, WinAMP, even MMJB. But none of them were the best player they could be. Each had gut-wrenching flaws but had something they were really good at. MacAMP/AST became too expensive (you know, back when you had to pay for MP3 players that weren't hardware) but had killer skins. SoundApp ran without fuss, but had no equalizing options to speak of and very limited playlist options (to be fair, SoundApp was more a conversion utility... it just happened to be a player I used because it was fast). And on and on...

Then a couple of years ago, iTunes came out for Windows, and I downloaded it within hours. I'd played with it before - in fact, I would make trips to CompUSA to play with their new OS X-enabled Macs and would just get bewilderd by how awesome iTunes was. Then, one shining, golden day, iTunes for Windows came out, and I've never gone back to anything else.

But there are two very serious flaws with iTunes, and they're really beginning to grate on me. First, and less serious, is the playlist management. The playlists themselves are fine and do everything I expect they would. But I will on occassion produce multi-CD mixes that I use for long drives (I had an 11-CD mix for my trip to Iowa last year). I create them in iTunes and keep the track list for each CD in a separate playlist. It's easier doing that than combining the CDs in one list, then having to re-create a single CD's list if I need to reburn it. What would improve iTunes in this regard would be hierarchical playlists. Keep all the mix CDs in a mix CD "super playlist" that expands only when you need to get at a specific part of the multi-CD group. This would also work when an artist releases a multi-CD album like, for instance, the 8-CD Red Rocks collection that DMB just put out. So, yeah... make playlists better. That's the first thing.

The second flaw, but far more debilitating one, is that the music that comes out of iTunes sounds like absolute shit, especially when you compare it to what I get coming out of a well-tuned WinAMP setup. In WinAMP I use a plugin called, simply, Enhancer. It is an inline DSP that performs all the functions of an equalizer (via the presets) but is oh-so-much more. You can add little things that vastly improve the sound quality, like reverb, or focus on very specific areas of the spectrum to compensate for your particular speakers or headphones. It's really something to behold. I really dislike most of WinAMP for listening to music - the playlist manipulation is abysmal - but Enhancer is a killer app. What iTunes needs is either to open up the plugin SDK to all comers, or - better yet - have the wizards over at QSC produce something for the iTunes.

So how about it Apple? You're celebrating the one billionth song downloaded from the iTunes store, and you're making money hand-over-fist from your iPods. How about putting a little more into your desktop application? Make us actually believe that the next version is really worth the downloading and not just a clever way to advertise the Music Store.