Reuben Ingber

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Smarterbits: Four Point Wishlist for the iOS Music App

Some of which will also inadvertently improve iTunes

Try as I might to find some, there’s little hope of iTunes getting any better in the foreseeable future. I’ve accepted this reality and for the most part, except when using the iTunes Store, I can ignore OS X’s media closet/abyss. Instead, I’m almost exclusively using the iOS Music app for music playback and while perfectly serviceable, I do think there are a few improvements Apple could make to the app. Unlike iTunes, improving the Music app shouldn’t require a Herculean effort, so I’ve pared down this wishlist to four simple and achievable alterations.

1. iTunes Match Streaming

At its launch, the appeal of iTunes Match lay in the possibility of finally leaving my iPod Classic behind. Even after Apple started offering 64GB iPhones, I always needed to carry my Classic around if I wanted to have access to my entire music library on the go. The twenty five dollars I spent signing up for iTunes Match seemed like a steal: A pittance in return for an iPhone with unlimited music storage. Unfortunately, each song you listen to using iTunes Match within the iOS Music App is purpose defeating-ly downloaded onto your iPhone. I know it’s not due to some technical constraint: You can listen to songs simultaneously as they download from Apple’s servers and iTunes Match on my Apple TV only allows streaming given that the Apple TV as no physical storage capacity. Why allow streaming on one but not the other? Worse still, there’s no efficient way to get rid of your songs should you inadvertently fill your iPhone’s capacity using iTunes Match. The quickest method I’ve found is to delete each artist one by one until you’ve cleared enough space for the next album you’d like to play. Tedious at best, you’d think there’d be a simple and obvious way to avoid all this hassle. Oh yeah…

If it’s a matter of not using up a user’s data cap, why doesn’t Apple add a “stream over 3G” toggle in the Music settings, as it does for iTunes Store purchases. Worried about running out of data? Turn it off. Worried about running out of tunes to listen to on the drive to work? No worries.

As it stands, the inclusion of streaming on iOS devices is going to weigh heavily on the status of my iTunes Match subscription come fall.

2. Podcast Subscriptions

I’m don’t want anything fancy, only the ability to automatically download the latest episode of shows already in my iOS music library. Push notifications to let me know they’re available would be nice as well.

Instacast may already be fulfilling my needs in this regard, but I’m starting to feel I’m not its intended audience. I don’t make use of most of its features, even basic ones like links to show notes or its various playback speeds. All I want is to always have the latest episode of my favourite podcasts available as soon as they are released. I don’t see why the Music app couldn’t handle these basic needs itself.

Again, I suggest three toggles within the Music settings:

Automatically download latest episodes when they become available.

Download podcasts over 3G.

Notify me when new episodes are available.

3. Song “Queue”

I love to hook up my iPhone to my work stereo but given that I work in a communal space, my co-workers will frequently have requests for a particular song or artist. Though I’m more than happy to oblige, there’s no efficient way to keep track of everyone’s requests without having to actively remember them. I could create a playlist¹ but it’s cumbersome and often times I don’t get enough requests to warrant creating and managing an entire playlist. It’s usually the case that in the middle of album X someone will be reminded of a specific song from album Y and want to hear it but then want to continue listening to album X afterwards.

The solution I envision is to create a “mostly” invisible playlist that acts as an active queue of songs. You’d be able to add songs to the queue using a gesture, button, or long tap from the list view of your songs as you browse. You can add as many songs as you like, and after each one plays, the Music app clears them out of the queue. When the queue is empty, the Music app returns to the last song you were listening to before you added a song to the queue(useful in cases like above).

I described it as a “mostly” invisible playlist because although it needn’t be user facing most of the time, I could envision cases where you’d want the ability to clear a queue that’s gotten to long or that you no longer want to use. Maybe it could be listed among your playlists as “Queue”, if only for the purpose of deleting some or all of the songs contained within it.

This is perhaps my wildest “improvement” seeing how it’s the only one that’s tied to a specific type of use. The addition of a “Queue” to the Music app is probably not broad enough a feature to warrant attention. Yet I can picture a solution similar to what I’ve described being really practical not only in crowded work environments but also at parties or for people who like to create one-of mixes on the fly.

4. More Input on Genius Recommendations

Until your library gets to a certain size and diversity, Genius playlists work as advertised. But if you’re like me and your tastes are diverse and vast, then you’ve probably noticed that our tastes are difficult to decipher for the Genius algorithms. The problem is that those algorithms work off the metadata that’s provided with your tracks. As the size and variety of your music library expands, the limited amount of metadata available to Genius isn’t sufficient enough to hone in on what exactly you have in mind when you invoke it. The metadata isn’t scalable and the results frequently start seeming more like a genre “shuffle” playlist. This is especially true if your metadata is incomplete or not specific enough. You can see this best when looking at the ready-made Genius Mixes. Those that seem best curated, in my case, are from genres where track metadata is very specific (“neo-soul” songs), the pool of tracks isn’t too large (video game soundtracks), or happen to include many tracks I purchased from the iTunes Music Store directly(I’ve collected an impressive Jazz album tab). Conversely, my Genius mixes created for “indie-rock”, “alternative”, and “folk” are all over the place, precisely because the metadata available is too broad or there’s simply too many tracks to choose from. What’s missing from the Genius algorithms is my input. I’d love a way to marry its math to my tastes, so it could know that when I select “Metal Heart” by Cat Power to lead a Genius playlist, I want to listen to sad piano tunes and melancholic lyrics specifically and not “contemporary folk” songs in general.

Although I have specific solutions to my other wishes, I’m a bit at a loss with this one. The Genius algorithms seems to be dialled to “good results most of the time for most users” and I wouldn’t want to suggest a fix that only improves my needs and ruins everyone else’s. Perhaps there could be an advanced preference pane where you can set some example pairings for the Genius algorithms to base themselves on. Or a toggle that, when activated, allows Apple to closely monitor your play history ² so it could infer patterns from your normal usage. I also like the idea of integrating Genius recommendations more tightly with your song ratings, something akin to Netflix’s recommendation system. I’m weary however that this would be to difficult implement on top of the existing Genius architecture. A rating system also demands active participation, which doesn’t exactly fit the “every user” mantra.

Look at it this way: Any improvements made to Genius on iOS will surely be passed onto iTunes as well. The prospect of that alone should be enough incentive for Apple to dedicate time to improving it.

iTunes is more malleable in this regard. Dragging songs onto a playlist in iTunes is easier than navigating multiple menus on iOS’s Music App. ↩

Leveraging my Queue idea for this purpose would be genius no? ↩