Microblog post

People slam iTunes a lot as being bloated and bad. I’ve yet to find another interface that is as quick and easy for browsing and searching my music library. Browsing is straight forward (with the “Songs” view) and searching works the way it should.

If I search “Waits”, I want to see albums and song by Tom Waits, albums and songs with “Waits” in the title, and if my collection is tagged right, songs written by Tom Waits.

If I go to the artist “Sam & Dave”, I want to see all the albums I have that feature Sam & Dave. Not just the albums that they put out, but compilations they are on as well.

iTunes gets the all of the above right. Volumio gets the searching kind of right, but the browsing is a bit painful. Sonos has some weird ‘compilation’ setting that can kind of get you most of the above behavior, but I shouldn’t have to configure said setting to run a search and see all the albums (including compilations) that Sam & Dave are on. Browsing isn’t as good as iTunes either. Even “Music” on iOS struggles a bit with this. I can find Sam & Dave songs on compilations when I search, but compilations don’t show up under their albums. This shouldn’t be that hard.