iTunes is the new Windows

Just so you don’t think this is a compliment… to me Windows is a necessary evil. I dislike it for so many reasons. I don’t have the time to state them all. I tolerate it because it’s at work and all of our clients have it. They have just too much penetration to completely avoid. I think this is the main reason why they are so marginal. Whatever they produce people will buy. I’m just glad Linux and Mac are slowly eroding their strangle hold on operating systems. My laptop belongs to work. My crappy desktop won’t do Linux. When I buy my next set it’ll be a Powerbook and a Linux desktop.

iTunes is the new Windows. I love my iPod and hate iTunes. What a pathetic piece of bloatware. Talk about bringing a machine to it’s knees. I don’t want to sync all my music. I use multiple computers and it’s my music so I’ll put it where I want. No I don’t want to buy anything from iTunes and stop putting Quicktime in my startup folder. Ahhrge! I just want to use my iPod. When I can I use WinAmp, (they are even getting invasive with their auto open in your face menus, I digress) but the real rub of late is Podcasts. I love podcasts. I hate the way iTunes manages them. I’ve tried all sorts of podcast managers and none seem to have all the features I want so I’m back to grumbling about iTunes.

I even made a passionate plea to a few software developers and on a few message boards for some ideas or help, but got nothing. In preparation for my postings and beggings I put together a list of what I which a podcast manager would do. so here is the list.

What I want from a podcast manager!

Each subscription feed needs to be able to be managed separately in these specific ways:
1. Sync from the folder where the files reside automatically, manually, or through some scheduling mechanism. If there are new files in the folder or if there has been new input form the iPod, the software should be able to react accordingly.
2. Put podcasts in iPod “Podcast” menu. If you don’t use iTunes too read your feeds your podcasts are lost in the rest of the files. The don’t show up in the iPod “Podcasts” folder.
3. Put video podcasts in iPod “Video Podcasts” menu. Same situation for video files./li>
4. Allow input from iPod by using ratings. One of the other podcast software packages that I tried did this. What a great idea. iTunes should do this with all their files. If the song, video, picture, or podcast is no longer wanted, you should be able to specify that a rating of 1 is delete.
5. On import fix all tags set individually per subscription. I don’t know what is up with podcasters, but hey seem to get “all sorts of creative’ every time with file names. Then they all show up differently and don’t sort right, etc. Each feed should have every tag configurable on download and save.
6. Remember place in podcast at replay. iTunes has some funky format, that I’ve messed with for audio books, that makes a file remember your place in the file for replay.
7. Toggle include in music randomizing. Each feed should be able to set whether you want to have it play when music is randomized or not.
8. Make a playlist via some settings of certain playlists. I would like all my new posdcasts downloaded that day in a playlist. If I could schedule a daily donwloa then I coudl just hit play and do all my news and such in one fail swoop and not worry about hunting to find the new stuff. There would need to be some settings on when those get deleted too.

I’m working on some scripts through the iTunesCOMWindowsSDK. I think I can do some of those and bundle them in scheduled action. We’ll see how far I get.