Frustrated by iTunes…

Apple recently dumped iTunes 8 on us, quietly removing a couple of configuration options in the process.  The new iTunes, with its not-so-clever “Genius” function, seems to be a not very subtle attempt to sell more music through the iTunes Music Store.

In iTunes 7 you could hide the “Genre” column in the 3-column browser pane and instead show just the “Artist” and “Album” columns.  In iTunes 8, “Genre” is back and there is no way to get rid of it from the preferences.  Likewise, the annoying arrow links to the iTunes Music store, which could previously be turned off, are back.

Fortunately, on the Mac at least, the old preferences can still be tweaked, just not from the iTunes GUI.  You have to run the following commands from Terminal (thanks to Mac OS X Hints for the information):

defaults write com.apple.iTunes show-genre-when-browsing -bool FALSE

defaults write com.apple.iTunes show-store-arrow-links -bool FALSE

…impressed by BBC Radio Labs

While on the subject of iTunes, Matthew Wood at the BBC’s Radio Labs has come up with a way to access the BBC’s on-demand radio content, and associated programme information, from iTunes.

Unfortunately, the BBC’s live streaming is still not available in iTunes because it uses RealPlayer.  It would be great to have a single, useful front end for all Internet radio stations rather than having different applications and web players for different broadcasters.

On the plus side, I like the new Radio Pop site that the Radio Labs team have built using Ruby on Rails.  The name’s a bit misleading – it sounds like it’s a new pop music radio station.  It’s actually a social radio site.  A bit like Last.fm but for BBC Radio (and potentially other radio stations in the future).  Perhaps they can hook it up to the real Last.fm so that your radio listening is combined with your CD/MP3 listening?  In fact, they already have something along those lines.  They also already automatically scrobble all tracks broadcast (see the BBC 6Music page on Last.fm for an example).

I’ve been following the Radio Labs blog for a while now.  It seems like a great place to work.  Lots of interesting experimental projects and cutting-edge technology.