Mac Forum / Applications / Mac Applications / October 2006

Fine program, iTunes, with fine features & good design.

In the highly intuitive interface there are some things I haven't managed
to intuit, like, Can you sort on more than one field? (You can sort on any
column, but it doesn't seem to be a stable sort, in which the results of
one operation carry over into the next. E.g., sort on Track #, then CD #,
then Album, then Cmposer or whatever: it would come out in a useful order;
but it doesn't seem to do that. I can see an implementation reason why it
would not work this way, but is a Mac user supposed to accept *that* as an
excuse?)

But the main problem seems to be a fundamental lack in the design. Namely,
the iTunes model of a collection of music seems to be, "A bunch of songs
that may come from arbitrary collections recorded on tracks in arbitrary
order on a CD."

A piece of music that occupies more than one track? Why would anyone want
to do that? (Hint: see subject line)

So people kludge it one way or another, like the Songs named --to switch
composers --
Horn Concerto No.4 in E Flat Major, K495: 1 Romance
Horn Concerto No.4 in E Flat Major, K495: 2 Rondo
...
or something like that, which will show up together when the listing is
sorted. (The sequence numbers are unnecessary if you can sort by track #
within some other sort; see above.)

Or, of course, have hundreds or thousands of little play-lists. (Does this
work out well? It doesn't look as if there are good ways of managing a
long list of playlists, but I haven't tried.)

I must be overlooking something here. How do people who have collections
of real music, of whom there must be a million, deal with this?