Music services have gotten significantly better over the years, but I'm still waiting for nirvana. Here's what that would be for me.
- One music collection, stored on my computer and backed up into the cloud
- Auto de-dupe of music and auto fix all meta data on it too (title, artist, and album, but also album art, genre, year, and yes even lyrics).
- Warn me of crappy quality songs that I might want to re-rip or purchase. Skips, <= 128kbps, bad encoder etc. Even better, find updated versions out on the InterWebs and auto-replace it for me.
- Have a single rating system that syncs across all access points. Also sync with other services I may have used in the past (Yahoo! Music, Pandora, Last.fm etc.) Make it dead easy to rate a song from anywhere I'm listening to it.
- Music discovery. You know my collection. You know what I rated highly. Give me new music that I might like as well. Sure, let me go tweak the parameters if I want, but smart defaults go a long way.
- Same with new music. If there's a new album out of an artist I like, let me know. Play it for me. Encourage me to buy it.
- Fill my iPod with random songs every time I sync. Well, you only need to replace the ones I've already heard. Unless I really like it a lot and have been playing it a lot. then you can be smart and keep it around.
- Ideally, everything happens over the net. I shouldn't have to dock and sync in order to get new music on my iPod. It has wifi. Do a trickle update in the background.
- Use text-to-speech and speech-to-text as an interface. This is already an audio medium. Why can't I just say "Next" or "2 stars" or "pause" or "play Barely Breathing"? And also, why can't I hear the artist and title announced? (OK, Apple is starting to do this. Kudos. but it needs to be easier to access.)
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