Some people whistle while they work; I listen to music. Depending on where I’m working, I’ll listen to iTunes or Amarok, and occasionally even put on the radio to remember why I stopped listening to the radio in the first place.

Even though Amarok blows iTunes away in many departments, I like iTunes, and believe it's a great bit of software, especially for users like my parents: it’s easy to use, hard to break (unless you’re really trying to fuck something up) and it looks pretty, especially since they integrated Cover Flow. I think iTunes can be better, though, and since I’m not a programmer (though I once played a Nanite creator on TV) I puzzled out some idealistic ways that I think iTunes could be dialed up a little bit closer to Awesome.

I kept a couple of criteria in mind as I made this list: I think the average iTunes user doesn’t want to mess around with AppleScript or do anything which involves the command line. I think they enjoy many of the “set it and forget it” features iTunes incorporates (like scheduling podcast downloads, auto-updating iPods when you connect them, etc.,) and enjoy that (most of the time,) iTunes “just works.”

So with all that in mind, here we go . . .

1. Eliminate crippling DRM from the iTunes Music Store.
Steve Jobs says that he only has DRM in iTMS purchases because the big evil music publishers won’t let him sell their songs without it. If that’s the case, what about the indie labels who believe that obscurity is a greater threat than piracy, and don’t want their files to be sold with crippling DRM? If that’s the case, why not really play hardball with UMG and the rest of them and force them to give up the DRM? The iTunes Music Store is the unquestioned industry leader; where are they going to go? Microsoft? Ha. Ha. It is to laugh.

I think Jobs’ blog post made for some great PR a month or so ago, but I don’t think that he is truly serious about removing DRM from anything -- at least in the near future -- because we all know that the DRM isn’t there to protect files as much as it’s there to force iTunes users to buy and use iPods. Sure, I can burn and rip my iTMS purchases to get rid of the DRM, or run some third party application, but that’s an annoying pain in the ass, and this is all about being easy peasy, remember? (Please note that I love my iPod, especially my shuffle, but I also love the idea that once I pay for something it’s mine, including music. If I want to play it on a Zen or add it to a Linux library, then I should be able to do that without a lot of complicated bullshit.) So the first thing is, we kill all the DRM.

2. Amarok’s greatest hits
Amarok is filled with insanely cool features that excite music nerds almost as much as finding a box filled with Blue Note acetates at a yard sale. They’re designed to encourage listeners to “rediscover [their] music” but Apple could take that rediscovering one step further, and turn it into (DRM-free) purchases: With Cover Flow, I can flip through my music collection, which looks cool, but is not especially useful. Well, taking a page from Amarok, what if I could control-click on a Cover Flow image, and get access to the artist’s Wikipedia page, song lyrics, and MusicBrainz information? The closest iTunes currently comes to this sort of rockin’ feature is the Ministore, which doesn’t work with streaming radio, only provides links to similar artists, and really feels like irritating advertising more than anything else. For those of you scoring at home: irritating=BAD! cool and useful=GOOD!

3. Take my money, please!
You know what I love about the iTunes Music Store? How stupidly easy it is to fill up my collection with back catalog stuff, buy iMixes and essentials, and enjoy the nearly-instant gratification of the 1-click purchase. (In fact, it’s so easy to do this, I advise avoiding what my friend Margaret and I called “the iTunes bender,” where you find yourself two and one-half sheets to the wind, buying music from iTunes because, “OH MY GOD MAN I FUCKING LOVED THIS SONG SO MUCH IN HIGH SCHOOL!!1!” only to crawl out of your hangover the next day and wonder what the hell you’re going to do with all that new Rick Springfield music.)

In addition to the iTMS, there are several other great online music sellers that fly below the radar of most consumers (CD Baby, eMusic, and Magnatune all come to mind.) Wouldn’t it be great if iTunes had native support for these alternative music stores, so buying music from them would be as easy – and as integrated – as buying from the iTMS? In place of my pathetic photoshop and gimp skills, imagine little green icons for these other stores, sitting in iTunes next to the iTunes Store icon. Don't want to see them? No problem, they could be included or excluded in your preferences. If Apple really does make most of their money from iPod sales, this would be a winner for consumers, artists, and Apple. (File this one under Totally Idealistic Ideas Which Will Never Come To Pass But Would Still Be Pretty Neat-o.)

4. There are many copies
My wife, my son, and I all have separate accounts on our iMac, and we each have our own iTunes library to sync up to our own iPods. My son and I have a lot of crossover in our libraries (What can I say? The kid has good taste) so there is a ton of hard disk space wasted by duplicate files. On my Linux machine, I solved this problem by putting my music collection into /etc/Music, and making it accessible to all users on the machine. It’s possible to do something similar on my Mac, but it’s a colossal pain in the ass, and it's totally not something my parents could do. I’d love it if Apple would make it a simple option to keep all the ripped and purchased music in a directory that all users on the machine can read and write. When I add music, it automatically goes into my library and onto my iPod; when my wife or son add music, it tells me that there’s new music in /users/itunes/ and gives me the option of adding it, or ignoring it. Think of it as a media server, but on the same machine. We'll save space, we'll encourage each other to listen to new music, and since we can already share music across the LAN, and even the assclowns at the RIAA say families can share CDs (how mag-fucking-nanimous of them) this one may actually happen. What? Stop laughing!

5. Odds ‘n Ends
Finally, there are a few little tweaks that would vastly improve my iTunes experience, which is important, because it’s all about me.

I’d like a simple keyboard shortcut to rate songs. There are all these songs in my library which are unrated, because it’s a pain in the ass to switch to iTunes, click on the song that’s playing, and then adjust the rating. I like it that I can pretty quickly spin the wheel on my iPod to rate songs, so why not something just as easy when I’m sitting at the machine? A meta-key and a mouse gesture, a meta-key and a number, or just a dashboard widget, or something would make my smart playlists much more useful and current (yeah, “Do They Know it’s Christmas?” was totally five stars in December. Now? Not so much.)

Speaking of Christmas, you know how you get all that seasonal music in there, and you’re left with the option of manually unchecking each song, selecting them all as a group and excluding them from shuffle, or removing them entirely, just so you can add them back in next year? I’d like an advanced feature where I can tell iTunes, “This is Halloween Music. I want to you put it into my library on September 30, and take it out on November 2.” or “This is Christmas Music. I want you to start playing this on November 28, and take it out on January 5.” Set it and forget it is cool, guys. Make it automatically archive the removed files, and I'll buy you a donut. Hell, I'll buy you two donuts.

Finally, one idea I had has been reported on Ars Technica as actually happening: Credit for individual songs if you buy the album later. Have you ever bought some songs as part of an iMix, and liked one of them so much, you end up buying the whole album? Now you have a stupid duplicate song cluttering up your library, and you spent an extra dollar, (which you’ve recently learned the value of, if only to shut up your parents.) I love the idea of giving consumers a store credit, and I think that this will ultimately lead to Apple selling more music, as potential customers become more comfortable buying essential collections and singles, secure in the knowledge that they can buy the whole album later without getting screwed. Nice.

iCould go on, but iWon't
I’ve tried my best to beat this horse to death, but it keeps squirming around, so let me take one last whack at it: I know that there are countless reasons most of these suggestions won’t ever be adopted, and I also know that some of these functions can be currently handled by AppleScript, command-line hacking, or some combination of shenanigans and hijinks. I also realize that to some purists, iTunes and everything it stands for are big evil suck-o-trons. But Apple's developers have proved again and again that software can be both easy to use and full-featured. iTunes is the massive leader in online music purchases, so they're clearly doing something right. iLike iTunes, (iN iTheory, iAnyway) and would love to see it get (more) awesome.

Okay, the horse is dead, and that's my wishlist. What's yours?

Wil Wheaton feels the Illinoise.