• be the single most bloated and sluggish piece of software on my Mac
• have the most limited and worst thought out keyboard video controls (everything = pause)
• make migration a much bigger issue than it should be

But hey, it does sort my media very well on my hard disk. None of these things are my biggest problem with the application. The single thing that drives me the maddest is the inability to browse music as a song is playing in your library. You’d assume it would continue downwards, or in Shuffle if that’s on, through whatever the focused selection was when you started the song. For example, if I was in the ‘Radiohead’ song list and selected the first track on an album, it should continue playing if a friend comes to the computer and browses some other music, no? Instead, iTunes will see whatever you’re looking at as you browse around for fun, and start playing there as soon as it finishes a track. It’s idiotic behavior and it’s pretty inhibiting to the user experience in my opinion.

The obvious way around this is to create a playlist, but this is cumbersome. You can’t view the list as you’re viewing the library (short of creating a new, massive window just for the playlist), you can’t drag stuff into the position on the playlist you’d like (not easily, anyways), and when you’re done listening, you’ve got to either empty the playlist by ‘removing’ all tracks or delete the playlist. This speaks to the permanent nature of playlists, something a quick playlist absolutely shouldn’t be. When you hit ‘delete’ on a selection of tracks in a playlist, it confirms that you want to ‘remove’ those tracks with a dialogue – mind you, this can be disabled after the first occurance with a simple checkbox..

iTunes offers a couple other more recently implemented features along the ‘playlist’ lines – iTunes DJ and Genius. Neither is a custom playlist, although I love using iTunes DJ with a room full of iPhone or iPod Touch users running Remote (it feels so 21st century, right?).

The bottom line is, I really think iTunes needs a ‘quick’ or ‘active’ playlist. It’s a simple feature, and I’ve proven that below with a quick mockup of the feature.

(click to view full version) A potential quick playlist UI - simply displays the artist and song for each track. A tap of the delete key removes the selected track or multiple tracks, the blue button next to the 'genius' toggle in the bottom left toggles the quick playlist.

There you have it, this is my proposed fix.