#FF00AA

Dear Stevie:
Maybe you’ve been told before, but I never read it on the blogs, so I’ll tell you: iTunes is a super music library management tool, but as the OS’s default media player it sucks. Am I the only one annoyed that, every time you want to play a file in iTunes, it’s added to the library, and you have to remove it manually if you only wanted to listen to it once? That’s counter intuitive to the max, and it’s unacceptable from a system component that offers to install itself as default handler of all sound files.

So, there it goes, Stevie: by the time iTunes 4.9 is released, I’d like you to play nice (as if) and add a “Temporary Files” source where files would automatically land unless they were explicitly added to the library, and have it be (optionally) purged on every launch, or every n days. There. Sounds simple, right?

While we’re at it, you could also consider the switchers’ interest and make sure they can easily transfer their iTunes library from Windows when they fork over 2000€ in order to enter the select G5 club. But it’d be too late for me anyway.

Oh, and I almost forgot… is it a Tiger functionality to have iTunes relaunch every other time I quit it? (It’s an exact figure, not an estimate or an exaggeration.) It’s a bit… disconcerting. Oh, wait, scratch that, it was a widget’s doing.

P.S. A quick search-and-replace in the Library.xml export file, and my library is on the Mac, complete with ratings and playlists. There are 11 songs missing out of 4,500… so I guess we’ll just assume they have a pretty good reason not to be there, and leave it at that. Some day I might try and do a diff on song lists — when I can be bothered to check out how that works.