Comment on Itunes 7.0 by Rian

Sun, 08 Oct 2006 11:21:34 -0700

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.

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.