At Home with John and Debbie

Update 2006-12-11: Moved into Wordpress. Unfortunately this loses the comments — although sorting the useful comments from spam made them all but useless. Added info about 2006 compilation improvement.
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Update 2005-02-07: Added section on remote control
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Update 2005-01-22: Added mention of iPod Shuffle
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Update 2004-10-07: Added “Custom Lists” section.
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Update 2004-09-20: There have been a moderate number of comments made refuting what I’ve written about the iPod, so in an effort to focus things, I’ve added a comment link for each subheading, so that you can respond to each point in turn. I would ask that commenters check back a couple of days after commenting, to see my response. I promise, if your point is valid, I’ll acknowledge it. If you’re wrong, I’ll tell you. If I don’t understand, I’ll ask for clarification.
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Update 2004-09-13: Danny Bishop made some intelligent comments by clicking the “comments” link at the bottom. I have updated this document accordingly. Some of his comments indicate that some of the problems I identify have been fixed in later hardware revisions. I have a 3rd generation iPod with the solid-state scroll wheel and separate buttons. I can hardly afford to buy more iPods in order to document the differences between them, so please bear this in mind when reading.
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We bought an iPod in early 2004. I’d read a lot of gushing praise for the iPod interface on the Internet, so I expected it to be pretty damn good. After all, how hard can it be?

It turns out the iPod interface is satisfactory, but by no means perfect. I probably wouldn’t have complained about the following interface faults if it weren’t for the widespread claims that it’s faultless; which it isn’t. I’m not able to cite a consumer portable MP3 player with a better interface, but that is not the point of this piece. The point is, it could be better. It is not perfect.

Scrolling

Central to the iPod interface is the scroll wheel that dominates the face of the device. The primary use for this is to scroll through lists of options (but see “modality” below). A button in the middle of the wheel then selects the highlighted option. The original model had a real wheel that turned, but later models, including mine, use a touch sensitive surface, so you stroke it, and it’s like turning it.

So far, so good. You turn the wheel, you scroll down an item. You turn it faster, you scroll down faster. You can navigate down a heirarchy of short lists quite quickly and easily.

However, there is a problem in that not all lists are short. If it’s a list of songs, there could be thousands of items in a single list. I generally start by browsing by artist, so that’s a list of a little over 200 items in my case. Scrolling through is tedious. Not only that, but the interface appears to notice you’ve been scrolling for a while, and speeds up the scroll for you. Navigating to an entry somewhere in the middle of the list is really quite tricky.

One solution to this might have been to provide a breakdown by first letter, so rather than going “artist -> (long scrolling session) Smiths”, I could go “artists by initial -> (short scroll) S -> (short scroll) Smiths”.

Modality

This one gets my goat. I’m a keen user of the text editor Vi. Vi commits what Mac zealots consider to be the cardinal sin of user interfaces: modality. Hitting “x” in one mode causes an “x” to appear in your document, while hitting “x” in another mode causes the character under the cursor to be deleted. The anti-modality argument is that the user shouldn’t need to remember what “mode” the application is in in order to know what a given action will cause to happen.

I happen to believe that Vi’s modality is fine, because when you’re using Vi you’re always consciously switching modes, and in any case, there’s a quick and (conditioned) instinctive way to return to the start mode at any time.

On the iPod, turning the scroll wheel causes the currently displayed list to scroll. If you don’t touch any of the controls for a certain length of time, the mode changes to “Now Playing” and the wheel becomes a volume control. This is a quite staggeringly awful design decision in my opinion.

Danny writes:

There is another VERY quick, VERY easy way to get to the volume control: press the center button!

… but Danny has missed the point. The centre button only does this in “Now Playing” mode. If you are in “browsing a list” mode, the centre button acts on the currently selected list item (takes you to a submenu, plays a song, etc.)

Danny mentions that the centre button takes you between volume, track control and ratings. This is by no means intuitive, and I will admit that I went some weeks thinking it was impossible to quickly go to the middle of a track, or adjust ratings on the iPod. I found it eventually.

In fact, unless you use the optional remote control in line with the headphone (which can’t be used in conjunction with an iTrip), this is the only way to adjust the volume while you’re in a menu — a reasonably fundamental thing to want to do. Actually there is another way: you can navigate to the root menu, then back up to “Now Playing” — but this is generally slower than just waiting.

Searching

A reasonable thing you might want to do is find a song, then play the whole album containing that song. This is surely a common thing to want to do with compilation albums, where you know you have a song, but you can’t remember where. iPod does not allow you to do this, except manually: you can navigate to the song, play it, wait for the “Now Playing” screen, note the album title, then navigate back to the root menu, browse by album, and choose the album you require. Remember how much scrolling that entails.

There is no search facility at all in the iPod interface: all you can do is scroll through lists. If you know the second word of a song title and not the first, the only way you’re going to find it is by checking each song one by one.

“On the Go” Playlist

iPod only lets you manipulate one playlist without the aid of iTunes, the so called “On the Go” playlist. There are only two things you can do to the “On the Go” playlist: you can add tracks to the end of it, and you can clear it.

It would seem reasonable to expect to be able to remove selected tracks from the “On the Go” playlist, but you can’t.

Queuing

Winamp has a nice feature whereby it will accept instructions from other applications to “Enqueue in Winamp” — i.e. don’t play this now, play it when you’ve run out of other things to play.

It would be nice if you could do this on the iPod, and you can: but only if you’re currently playing from the On the Go playlist, so you have to know you’re going to want to do it before starting listening.

Another oddity about adding to the end of the On the Go playlist is that if you’re in shuffle mode, then play your On the Go playlist, it will play the list in random order as expected. If you add more songs to the list, however, they don’t get shuffled in until you stop playing and restart.

Sensitivity

I believe the original iPod had “clicky” buttons, which you could feel for, then push. The new iPod has touch sensitive buttons with no moving parts. You cannot brush past a button without the software registering a button push.

Various Artists

Having singleton tracks, or various artists in your music library causes problems with the iPod interface. The main problem is that it pollutes “Browse by Artist” with artists for whom there are no full albums.

If you go into the iPod interface with the goal of listening to an album, but not being sure who by, you’re going to have to scroll through a list of artists, many of whom are irrelevant to your goal, having only one song on the iPod.

The other option is to browse by album, but on a full 20Gb iPod that’s an awfully long list of albums, and the logical way to sort albums is by artist, then by title.

I believe the root cause of this is that Apple’s designers don’t expect you to have that goal. Unfortunately, I often do.

A “browse by artists with albums” option would solve this issue.

Danny comments:

Various Artists problems are most often caused by people who haven’t taken the time to sort out their library… I don’t have one artist titled “Various Artists”, and I’ve got 9,000+ songs on a 40G iPod… What the iPod UI designers probably assumed is that YOU would actually want to know who the artist was… not that you WOULDN’T want to know… take a moment to go and update your library of Mp3s with the correct info… hey, there are even programs to help you if you’re lazy enough not to want to do it yourself.

… which means I’ve failed to communicate the problem adequately.

My MP3s are properly labelled: I don’t see “Various Artists” in any iPod menus either, and this is the problem. Let’s say I want to listen to the compilation album “Two Zombies Later”. The natural thing to expect is to be able to go to “Artists” then “Various”, then see a list of compilations. This option is not present on my iPod.

Instead, the only way I can get to “Two Zombies Later” is to scroll through a list of 300 albums: all my single artist and compilation albums. I believe this is because the iPod designers didn’t expect us to want to listen to compilations: they expected us to be compiling our own playlists.

I note that since upgrading iTunes there is now a “Compilations” entry at the top of the “Artists” list, so maybe this is fixed in newer iPods too.

The second “Various Artists” problem is that if I store compilations on the iPod, I end up with hundreds of artists in my “Artists” list, making it hard to browse for an album. For example, “Two Zombies Later” contains 31 tracks, each by an artist I’ve never heard of before. If I want to navigate to an album by “Chenard Walcker” by choosing “Browse by Artist”, I have to scroll past “Bruce Lenkei”, “Bumpenstein”, “Black Sash”, “BR Cleve and His Lush Orchestra”: artists who are all completely irrelevant when looking for an album, because they don’t have an album on my iPod.

2006-12-11: I had a brief play with a new iPod Nano before wrapping it as a gift. The settings menu now has a “compilations” option. With this turned on, tracks which appear in compilations do not pollute your main “artists” list. I have not been able to explore the details, but this is a marked improvement.

Custom Lists

The iPod allows you to store one kind of custom list — known as a playlist. A playlist is a list of songs. There is no means to maintain a list of artists, or a list of albums. Wouldn’t it be simple — and great — if you could browse an auto-generated list of “artists with more than 10 songs in my library” or a manual list of “my favourite artists” or “my favourite albums”?

Furthermore, playlists and albums appear in different parts of the UI. It seems to me that an album is simply a specialised kind of playlist (one maintained by the software based on metadata contained in the music files). Shouldn’t it be possible for playlists to appear in lists of albums?

I need to explain the above with a “f’rinstance”. Super Furry Animals recently released a best of album - “Songbook”. I own every track on that album, since I own all of SFA’s previous albums. Hence, I can in good conscience create a playlist that’s identical to the best of album.

It seems reasonable that having created this “virtual” SFA album, I should be able to label it as “Songbook” by “Super Furry Animals”, and that it should appear alongside all the other Super Furry Animals albums. However, instead it only appears in the “playlists” view. I can’t get a view that shows me every SFA album on my system.

A workaround is to copy each music file, and edit its metadata to album “Songbook” and its track number within that album. This has two flaws: it wastes storage, and it offends my sense of elegance.

The “playlists” view is flat, not hierarchical, so there are only so many playlists you can manageably have.

iTunes

I wrote: There are simply too many ways in which iTunes annoys me to enumerate today.

I have since learned to live with iPod’s interface weirdness. I assume all these strange idioms are second nature to Mac users: but to Windows users they are new, and they are not documented in the iTunes manual. For example - CTRL-click to tick / untick all items in a list. A colleague found out how to do this on a message board.

Listening Habits Forced by Interface

One often hears praise for iPod of the form “It’s great: I can put on my whole collection on ’shuffle’ and the iPod will choose stuff for me all day”. I honestly believe that iPod makes you do things like that, by simply not making it easy enough to choose music on the fly. “I quite fancy listening to The Flaming Lips right now, but I can’t be bothered, so I’ll listen to something random instead”.

I note that 4G iPods take this even further, by placing a “shuffle all my songs” option on the front menu.

… and now this is taken to its logical conclusion with the marketing of the iPod Shuffle. Sure, you could listen to songs in the order you want, but it’s much easier to let us do it for you at random.

Remote Control

If you’re lucky, the iPod comes with a remote control. The remote control is on a wire which connects to the headphone socket and to the digital socket next to it. The headphones then plug into the remote control.

The remote control has a “hold” slider, and buttons for play/pause, volume up, volume down, skip forward, skip back.

The remote control should provide a simple way to shove your hand in your pocket while listening on the street, and skip a track you don’t like, or adjust your volume for a new set of surroundings. Unfortunately, the symmetry of the remote control makes it very difficult to tell by feel which button is “volume down” and which is “skip forward”, and similarly with “volume up” and “skip backward”. Especially when you are at the end of a playlist or album, skipping forward when you didn’t mean to can leave you in a mess, so trying to handle the remote control “blind” is pretty much a no-go.

Conclusion

So, there’s a lot wrong with the iPod UI.

However, I don’t regret buying one at all. For all its faults, I’m given to understand that the alternatives are worse. It’s apparent that nobody has quite got the hang of managing large collections of music on a handheld device yet. In fact, I’ve not seen a satisfactory desktop application for managing music either (the best I’ve seen so far is SlimServer).

Probably, the dedicated iPod lover’s answer to most of my criticisms is that I’m expecting to do things with the iPod alone which I should be doing in iTunes: Apple wants me to generate a manageably small set of playlists while I’m at a computer, and use those while on the move. I could be an obedient consumer and do things the way Apple dictates — but it’s OK if I make a note of how I’d rather things worked, isn’t it?