ID3 sucks, make it better

We’re in a digital age. Companies like twitter are always expanding what their product can do, based on how people use it. With a few exceptions, everyone seems to be jumping on the community driven bandwagon. The music industry isn’t, and maybe it has a right to hate it’s digital consumers.

I’ve downloaded music “illegally” but I’ve also downloaded it legally. I’m almost embarrassed to say I’ve paid for music in as so few people do. Slowly though it’s becoming easier to access legal ways of getting music on a computer, and I think everyone expected that. It just took time.

But really the music isn’t any different. I mean, if you download one legally, and one illegally it’s essentially the same thing. The biggest problem is downloading album art, and fixing ID3 tags.

I hate ID3 Tags…

I didn’t before. I just do now. It has to do with the fact they suck, and that’s purely it. Someone should redo them so they actually work properly. What do I mean?

Well they’re said to organize your music, and they do that just fine. But I mean it’s fine for like… 1995, where each kilobyte counted and you couldn’t store 160 gigs of music in your pocket. I mean songs can be 2MB, 4MB, 8MB, or 16MB I don’t care, storage of that size is almost free anyways. ID3 tags up a tiny fraction of that. I’d rather it take up twice the space as the song, if it did it’s job properly.

Say you’re searching for a new song, maybe “Young Forever” by “Jay-Z”. So you go to artists, and you look for “Young Forever”. But you don’t see it what’s the problem? Did he not make it?

He did, but the song features “Mr. Hudson” (whoever that is) so to find the song, you have to look for the artist “Jay-Z feat. Mr. Hudson”. That’s… stupid.

Have a separate field for features… Call it Additional Artists, or Collaberators, whatever you want, but don’t make me download an album and have all my music players think it’s by 30 different artists because each song has a different featured artists.

As any grade 10 kid will know. Common Factor that shit out. And maybe the Tagging is laggin behind, but surely there must be a computer science major who is smart enough to see the same problem. Surely he’s passed grade 10, and surely he knows you can parse text strings and “Common Factor that shit out”. You’d think giant corporations who make money with media players would do that… but they don’t. It’s… stupid

So… Maybe…

I hate all media players…

Because they suck. I want to listen to music. That’s it. Make it simple, make it intuitive. The “masters” have even failed and produced iTunes.

I mean, I don’t even want to get into the industry.. but there must be someone out there who can make money from this. It’s becoming better just to go on youtube and search for the music video of the song you want. Maybe Google needs to take a crack at it, they seem to be the only one out there that understands algorithms can help users find what they want.

Also, duplicate files are pointless, unless for backup purposes. So don’t show the exact same file in a media player’s library twice. That’s… stupid. Who wants to listen to the exact same song, in a row? People who put that song on loop.

What Should happen?..

Change. Innovation. Ideas. Something. Maybe It’ll happen like twitter, where the 3rd party apps make all the progress and then the common/great features get implimented into the actual product. ID3 tags maybe should lag behind media players, but not by much. Stay on your toes.

Here is what I want to see:

• Free. I wont use it if I have to pay for it. No one will. Find another business model. I don’t really care who knows what music I’m listening to. Most people sign up for Last.fm and want people to know what music their listening to. I REALLY don’t care if you collect anonymous information about my listening habits and sell them back to the music industry to pump out more songs I’ll listen to. That… really just makes sense.
• Connected to the cloud. I mean this in the most advanced, complicated, awesome way possible. I want all my music on my iPod, Cell Phone, Laptop, Desktop, Tv, anything connected to the internet. I want it available offline, and I don’t want to manually sync it. I’m needy… sorry. But not just basic cloud connecting crap, like saving your account online. I mean, fix all the tags for me, fill in the missing ones, get album art, suggest songs that I’ll like,
• Smart. I’m dumb, so make it smart. If I want “Jay-Z” realize that I mean “Jay-Z feat. Mr. Hudson” too. Realize also, that if I’m looking for “Mr. Hudson” I’m probably also looking for “Jay-Z feat. Mr. Hudson”. Fix all my tags. I like things to look pretty, so fix everything for me. Pop/Rock is the same as Rock/Pop so just choose one, and switch all the others so they match. Fill in album information too.
• Be Reall Smart. I mean if Shazam can match any song using 30 seconds of audio, you can too. My desktop could’ve probably got NASA to the moon in the 60’s and your super server should help. If I don’t have any of the tags, do it up, magically! But… don’t get it wrong!
• Be Simple. Minimalistic, and intuitive. I want it bloated with features, but most of them should be invisible. You’re job is super duper complicated so mine flows smoothly. Spend time on UI design… A LOT of time. All of your features will suck if I don’t like how it looks
• Community Centered. I’m your friend… even though I’m needy and I make you want to say “Do it yourself!” Open up to plugin/extensions. They’ll do you good! The great ones, implement them directly in. Keep the people with the ideas, focusing on the ideas, you make sure everything works perfectly.

That’s all I’ve got.

What would you add to the list?

Comment below!