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"It's not much of a stretch to imagine Apple creating a personalized streaming music service in the style of Pandora, something the company is reportedly investigating. \nThe company already has Pandora-like technology in the form of its tune-matching feature, Genius. It has access to an unrivaled library of music, and a decade-long business partnership with the major labels. It has plenty of leverage with which to negotiate lower royalties, which Pandora would dearly love to do (its royalty fees are eating up revenue faster than ever, leading us to wonder whether Pandora can ever be profitable).\nAnd yet, as much as I'd love to customize some Apple radio stations, I find the news disappointing. Why? Because it suggests the Cupertino company is further away than ever from fixing its flagship music product, iTunes.\nRemember RealJukebox?\nI don't criticize iTunes lightly. I've been using it ever since the first year of its release, 2001. Back then I had my music library stored in a PC program, RealJukebox, one of the best tune management tools at the time \u2014 which is to say, it was god-awful.\nIf you wanted to use the search bar to find a song, it was best to go make a cup of coffee while the software found it. Sometimes it would crash, and awake with no memory of my library, forcing me to reimport everything and recreate all my playlists. And if you wanted to rip CDs at a higher bitrate than the low-quality 96 kbps, you had to pay.\nSo iTunes (on the Mac) came as a breath of fresh air. It was sleek and speedy, at first. I was amazed by how its real-time searching of a vast database could turn up results before you finished typing (remember, this was nearly 10 years before Google Instant). Syncing my first-generation iPod was faster than it has ever been since.\nHow iTunes Went Bad\nThe trouble started with the PC version, released in 2003 to accommodate the hordes of Windows users who wanted iPods. It gained a reputation as bloated and buggy, one it has never lost. But over time the Mac version started to resemble it, rather than the other way around. It was a classic case of feature creep.\nPing was the highest-profile failure, a ghost town of a social network baked into the software, something we have to remove via Preferences every time the software updates (and which Apple still won't let go of). But it was hardly the only one. \nRight now, I'm stuck on iTunes 10.6.2, one version behind, though it is crash-prone. Why? Because every time I try to upgrade, the software has decided to rebuild my entire library and loses my playlists, RealJukebox style. \nGame, Set and iTunes Match\nThen there's iTunes Match, a service which I both love and hate. I love having access to my entire library on my iPad and iPhone. I hate how slow it makes searching \u2014 almost RealJukebox slow, freezing the screen for what feels like minutes at a time. \nI understand if it takes a while to download a song. I don't understand why simply searching a database should cause such paralysis. This was the problem iTunes was designed to fix in the first place, wasn't it?\nAlso, iTunes Match seems to have broken Siri's ability to play music on the iPhone 4S. Given a verbal request to \"play a random song\" \u2014 which used to be one of the fastest ways to get your tunes going on the phone \u2014 she now dissembles. \"Uh oh, something's wrong. Can you try that again?\" she asks, every single time. \nLooking Forward\nThe iTunes Match and Siri problems may well be fixed in iOS6. As for iTunes itself, I'm not holding my breath.\nApple has taken to treating iTunes like an embarrassing uncle, giving you fewer and fewer reasons to interact with it. The company created the Podcasts app so you don't have to fire up the desktop version in order to subscribe to them. \nAs of iOS5, you don't have to look at iTunes when syncing your iPad or iPhone (though you still have to hook up the USB cable if you want to make backups, unless you have enough space on iCloud to backup there.) And the iOS versions of iTunes have been renamed \"Music\", though that isn't fooling anyone. \n(Some of you may be wondering why I don't simply give up and upload my entire library to Spotify. The answers could take up a whole other op-ed. But briefly: I don't want to pay a monthly fee, I can discover music in other ways, I like storing it locally, and see the aforementioned problem with streaming services and royalties. Spotify's business model is still unproven.)\nSo please, Apple, before you start developing any kind of Pandora-like service, consider the millions of us who are still using your core music product.\nReduce the bloat. Make it slim and streamlined and eminently customizable. Remember, it's basically a database. Take out the \"radio\" option; if we want to listen to radio streams, we can do it in the browser. And give Ping, the Walking Dead of social networks, a decent burial. \nIn short, please stop turning iTunes into RealJukebox.\nHow would you fix iTunes? Let us know in the comments."^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://mashable.com/2012/09/07/apple-fix-itunes/>