iTunes is a high quality program – it has quickly become my favorite MP3 player ever. So it’s frustrating that the one last thing I want iTunes to do will probably never get done by Apple. They did the innovative thing where they realized that playback was not the hard part of the problem, and that music collection management was. They also allow my collection to be shared with the computers around me.
But what I really want is two things – one is mostly optional, and the other is less so. As an optional feature, it would totally kick ass if we could get all the iBooks in a local area to play in synch. We have the Network Time Protocol that can get millisecond accuracy, so all we need to do is use it! That’s a nice, but optional feature. Note that it would probably include some sort of radio/audio streaming capability, which would be really nice.
The second feature is that, if we are all clustered in the same room and logged on via Rendezvous, iTunes should play what people who are sitting in the same room together all collectively like or probably would like, that nobody has heard in a while. Sort of a collective DJ. We can round-robin about who streams to whom, or we can have it always be one computer being the master. However it works, I want collective opinions to hold sway when music is being Party Shuffled to a collective.
