What does iTunes need?
Customiseable fields similar to "My Rating", as illustrated on the right.
Why?
Lots of people create playlists to suit different moods / occasions. But this is lots of manual work every time you want to create a new playlist. If you rank each song once on a set of custom criteria, you could create new playlists without having to go through your library again. It's basically an extension of the existing ratings system, but it would allow you to group your music in more dimensions than just how "good" a song is.
Want a relaxing playlist that other people will know songs from? Just get all the songs where "Softness" is above 2, and "Pop" is above 3.
Want a hardcore mix of your favourite unique music to rock out to all alone? Select songs where "Softness" is below 3, "My Rating" is above 2, and "Pop" is below 3.
There are boundless possibilities, and you could create your own attributes that suit your style of organising your music.
How?
Well that's the tricky part, I don't know yet. If Apple worked on it, I imagine it would be very easy to add this into the program. The menu option shown on the right could open a small dialog box, allowing you to select what sort of data you want (ie value / text), and give the field a name - it would then act just like the regular fields. I'm going to submit this to apple as a suggestion, but I can't imagine them being too speedy about implementing it, if they ever do.
The other option is to make some sort of plugin to accomplish it. I'd be more than happy to code it myself, but I don't think there's enough freedom in the COM SDK and Visualisation Plugin SDK to alter the interface as would be necessary. I guess it would also be theoritcially possible to hack the actual program itself to add this functionality, but that's an ugly approach which is undoubtedly illegal and would break when iTunes is next updated. Also, it's hard ;)
So here's where you come in. If you have any idea how this could be implemented, leave a comment. I'm very enthusiastic to make this work, but don't really know how it would be possible. Also if you have any improvements on my idea then post them here as well...
3 Comments:
Sounds like a great idea.
I'm not a big fan of playlists as you know, but I am a fan of programming, and i rate very highly the good ol' fasioned do-it-yourself.
And also the good ol' fasioned expression "If you want something done right..."
It will be interesting to see how this pans out.
Heya - sounds like a good plan. In the Rio player that I have, it has the Rio Music Manager. It's rather nice in the fact that you can sort the songs according to genre. So, I put a lot of rock and rap/hiphop on the front of the playlist with the softer stuff towards the end. This way, when I go to the gym, I've got the high energy songs to listen to, then the softer, slower ones for the stretching and slowing down. I can make up my own playlists which is nice. Once the songs are on the player, I can choose to play all songs, a genre or an artist. Good luck with the programming if you do go ahead with it. It never hurts to let Apple know what a customer thinks.
Sounds good, an i imagine it woudn't be very difficult for apple to do.