Itunes 7.0
So Apple, among other things released Itunes 7 today. While this seems to be an overall positive release I noticed one thing which really irks me. They added two new views for the music library. An album-grouped view and a sort of 3D – Flip view (a la Flip-3D). The annoying part is that these new views are not enabled for shared music libraries. This just baffles me. Itunes apparently supports album art over the shared music library, so why disable these features? Otherwise the interface for the shared and local is completely identical. I have pasted screenshots below. If you look closely you will see that the view buttons are disabled for the shared view.
The Local Library
The Shared Library
Anyway I hope apple fixes this in the next release.
-Ben
25 days later:
Unnecessary bandwidth use and network congestion. While not a concern on home networks, it very easily could be on organizational networks. You could certainly argue that compared to steaming music, bandwidth usage would be minimal, but that depends on a couple of factors: size of the library with album art embedded and size of the album art embedded. Much of my album art is 100KB in size or more. A 10 song album = 1000KB bandwidth usage. I’ve got about 6000 songs in my library. That’s a BOATLOAD of bandwidth to use just for the sake of viewing my library in a nifty way.
In fact, doing so would make the bytes that streaming music uses look like peanuts in comparison because it would be difficult to cache album art in any meaningful way. That means that if you connected to my library, you’d be using about 586MB of bandwidth every time you wanted to use that view. And that’s not spread out over minutes or hours like streaming music is. Even on a 100Mbit LAN, that’s going to take a long time, and is quite a bit of disk usage both for the host and for your machine.
In short, it’s just not very friendly to enable that view. On the other hand, supporting album art for songs currently playing or being viewed is tiny by comparison. 100KB once every 3 minutes (song change) or even every 5 seconds (looking at a new song without playing) is nothing.
25 days later:
Blah. Your blog software doesn’t support blockquotes for comments. :P
25 days later:
And yet we can share videos over an Itunes Share? Especially with gigabit ethernet becoming more common it seems like it should at least be an option to use the other two views.
28 days later:
Gigabit ethernet is only common in technology companies and at the home of technology enthusiasts. Your average corporation doesn’t have it because they don’t need it: it is an unnecessary expense.
I’ll stick with my 100Mbit example. About the max transfer rate over an unused 100Mbit line is about 12MB/sec. So assuming you have 500MB of album art, that’s going to be almost 42 seconds to load that. In the meantime, the other person’s machine is going to be grinding. God forbid you’ve only got 256MB on a machine with a bunch of background processes running. This is common on the average computer user’s machine both at home and in corporate environments. Can you say paging?
Of course that 12MB/sec assumes that serving album art is straight file serving. It’s not. Album art is embedded directly into the ID3v2 tag of the mp3. id3v2 tags are stored at the beginning of the mp3 before the music data. Straight file serving is cheap in terms of processing (and speed) than parsing 6000 mp3s and pulling metadata from each one. Add even 0.01sec of a second for each mp3 (generous, given the average user’s mess of an OS installation) and you’re going to end up with 60 seconds added to that original 42 seconds.
102 seconds to load album art. That’s not very user friendly, now is it?
In short, Apple would make more enemies than friends by including such a feature.
If you’d like to compare bandwidth usage for an average movie clip, we can do that too. Streaming individual movies is much friendlier than blasting 500-600MB over a network connection as fast as one can. Spread 500MB (which is about how much an iTunes Store television episode is) over 40 minutes?
Yeah you get the idea.
28 days later:
I should also mention that most of the artwork embedded in iTS purchases runs around 350KB, not 100KB.
28 days later:
Rian,
I agree with you that transmitting all of the album art at once would be a bad idea. However there is no reason that it needs to be implemented this way. Album art is already transferred when an album is played in Itunes, since each of the new views shows no more than 5-10 albums at a time the album art could be loaded on demand.
-Ben