First, I love iTu­nes. It’s the first media play­er I real­ly like. I’m using iTu­nes for about four years now and I’m real­ly satis­fied with it. Well, almost. 

 In the begin­ning paid songs whe­re copy-pro­tec­ted. This was bad, becau­se I could­n’t even make a MP3 ver­si­on of tho­se songs for play­back in my car. The only way to cir­cum­vent this was bur­ning the songs on an audio CD and reimport them as MP3. Not a very plea­sing way to work. Back then I did­n’t buy a lot of music at the iTu­nes store. This chan­ged quick­ly when Apple deci­ded to not copy-pro­tect the music any more. Now every song bought is copy-pro­tec­tion free. What I don’t under­stand is that I have to pay to remo­ve the copy-pro­tec­tion. € 0,30 for each song or 1/3 of the album pri­ce. Well, I did this for my favo­ri­te songs. Now I can burn them on a CD or copy them to a flash dri­ve and lis­ten to them in my car. Well, the lat­ter one does­n’t work becau­se my new car’s radio does­n’t have a USB plug, unfortunately. 

 At the moment I’m plan­ning my trip to Switz­er­land, so I’m pre­pa­ring some music for the trip. To achie­ve this I had to con­vert some of my bought music to play them with my car’s radio. When I sim­ply add bought tracks to a play­list and try to burn them to a CD, iTu­nes tells me some­thing like “this isn’t pos­si­ble as some of the selec­ted tracks aren’t in the right for­mat”. Well, so far I agree, but why the hack does­n’t iTu­nes offer me to con­vert tho­se tracks on the fly tem­pora­ri­ly and dele­te them again after the bur­ning pro­cess com­ple­ted suc­cess­ful­ly? I just don’t get it. Plea­se, Apple, this can’t be that hard. So, I had to con­vert each track I wan­ted to have on the CD manu­al­ly and, even worse, had to dele­te them manu­al­ly after­wards. Very frus­tra­ting and time-eating work. For­tu­n­a­te­ly there’s a (paid) tool on the mar­ket which can help you with this: Song Ser­geant. It cos­ts $ 20. So it’s not real­ly cheap, but well worth the money when you do this often. I bought the app a few weeks ago and wont miss it any­mo­re. But, nevertheless, I hope that Apple will imple­ment this kind of func­tio­n­a­li­ty in the upco­m­ing ver­si­on 9 of iTu­nes. For tho­se of you, who are in the same situa­ti­on, have a look at Song Ser­geant: http://www.lairware.com/songsergeant/

 What I miss next is the pos­si­bi­li­ty to sort my apps on my iPho­ne. When I remo­ve apps from the pho­ne I hap­pen to have gaps on the screens whe­re the apps were befo­re. This is ugly AND inef­fi­ci­ent. So this is the next point I hope Apple will fix in ver­si­on 9. Auto-sort would be nice, too. 

 The next thing: why can’t I wri­te SMS using iTu­nes when my iPho­ne is con­nec­ted to my com­pu­ter? And why can’t I read, edit and do other stuff with my notes on my iPho­ne? Does­n’t real­ly make sen­se. The next fea­ture for ver­si­on 9? 

 Apple, my birthday’s on tues­day. May­be this is your pre­sent which I’m get­ting on wednesday? 🙂