iTunes’ Stubborn Belief in Local Storage

Let me first start by saying that, overall, I like iTunes.  No, it’s not the uber-geek music player, but that’s probably why I like it.  It works and it works well.  It’s continued addition of new features like podcast subscriptions, PIM sync data to your iPod, and whatnot while maintaining that simplicity is commendable.

However, one of the things that I’m constantly stymied by with iTunes is the fact that it’s largely unfriendly to the reality that you might not have the music files you want it to be aware of on the local machine.  This, to me, is very peculiar.  As Apple has been encouraging us to have more and more digital media (which thus takes up more and more storage), and in concert has been (on their platform anyway) selling more and more laptops (vs. desktop units) – which traditionally have smaller storage capacities, the software still thinks that all our media will be local.

As I mention, this is especially painful for all us laptop users out there.  To frame the problem more concretely: for myself, I have two main machines (actually 3 total, but let’s keep this simple shall we?).  My travel/work laptop and my personal home desktop.  The size of my media library now and my desire to access it from multiple endpoints (note: I haven’t even started into the fact that my wife expects to be able to use thus stuff from her own laptop) necessitates that the media is stored at a central location.  In my case that’s a terabyte RAID system in the basement.  I recognize that many folks might not have such a system (yet), but I think it’s safe to assume that folks do have a single home machine that has the bulk of the household hard drive capacity and is used for the same thing.

Core Scenario

Here’s the full scenario¹ that I’m trying to deal with that iTunes just doesn’t care for:

• All of my media files (either ripped from my owned CDs or from purchased items off of iTMS or my photo directory²) are on the central server in the basement.  I travel with a laptop and I use a desktop at home.  My primary sync relationship for my iPod is on my laptop (as its always with me as is my iPod).

While connected to the LAN with the media repository:

• I can play my music through iTunes, can sync my iPod to that music, and can sync my iPod to my podcast subscriptions, photos, and local PIM data.

When on the road:

• I still can plug my iPod into my laptop.  I use this to charge the device, and to sync/update new podcasts and sync my ever changing PIM data. 
• Further, any media metadata updates (listened to state of a podcast, star rating of a song, on-the-go playlist changes, or new playlist changes that are created while the laptop is “disconnected” from its media) are sync’d. 
• Finally, music and photos are stored external to my mobile computer, so these do not sync and the last successfully sync’d content on the iPod remains unchanged.

iTunes Implications

Now, what improvements does this imply for iTunes to make that scenario a reality?  Here’s the few that I see right out the gate:

• First and foremost, don’t freakout because the music files aren’t “there”.  iTunes should be able to more smoothly deal with the possibility that it’s music files there sometimes and not others.  Today if a network share goes away, iTunes gets grumpy and then upon reconnect will often “re-index” your music files for gapless playback and the like.  This is unneeded and painful.
• Recognize the laptop subset.  I think it’s perfectly reasonable to ask the user “what type of computer are you installing this on”?  If you answer “a laptop” then it’s a good probability that online/offline libraries will be the norm.  This single piece of information should allow the programmers to be more clever without requiring the user to know to “go offline” or other such toggles on their own.
• Allow iPod sync when the music data is not available.  Today if the files are not about it will frequently result in rather unexpected behavior (ranging from iTunes hanging indefinitely to iTunes reporting that your iPod appears to be corrupted and should be re-imaged).  Instead, it should know that the media isn’t accessible, mount the iPod anyway, have a UI hint that music sync will not occur in such a state, and proceed with syncing the resources that are local to the machine still (transient podcasts, PIM data, and music/media related items like star ratings and playlists).
  • I call out the special sub-case of podcasts here.  I contend that this content type is much more transient in nature than my complete media library.  While being careful not to dive into the “geeky for geeky sake” realm, I’d argue that podcast updates while traveling/away from your main music library continue to be useful – especially for the bulk of the podcasts out there that I’d argue are set in iTunes to “listen to and auto delete when”.
• iTunes maintains the music metadata (and a cache of all the ID3 information embedded in those files) locally.  This should be enough to allow the user to still interact with the metadata/music listing without having the files around.

Some may argue that this is a geeky topic that only a technophile will bump into, however, I’m not so sure.  I have to believe that this is going to be an increasingly common set of scenarios, made all the more by continued adoption of laptops as users’ primary computers, consumer adoption of digitization of their media, and home terraservers becoming increasingly cheap.

1 Related but not core to the scenario at hand:  A loosely related item in iTunes land is that I’d love to be able to roam or share my iTunes media metadata (again things like my playlists or my star ratings) across multiple machines.  Because I have multiple use points, and these types of iTunes specific metadata are not embedded in the media files themselves (in contrast to the ID3 tag data), I often end up recreating it multiple times or not using the features at all.

2 Don’t even get me started on the problems that such a model introduces if you’re a Mac user with iPhoto as your main organizer.  This model really freaks out there (iPhoto doesn’t like to have the photos elsewhere other than its own local DB).  However, on Windows iTunes can just sync any old directory with photos in it.