Hopeless Geek

I want to bookmark a certain view in the browser so I can return to it (like command-clicking on artists to hear them mixed together).

Pardon me, but I don’t see the point of this. That is exactly what playlists are for. You’re trying to mix metaphors, and that’s a bad thing.

Also, automatic smart-playlist generation would be a hard problem. How is iTunes supposed to know what criteria you made your selection by? What if you want tracks X Y and Z because they are by a particular artist (and you want a smart playlist of those artists), but iTunes decides that you chose them because they are all from the year 1995, or are all the first track, or all were added in the last six days, or because they are all rated 3 stars.

And system-wide bookmarks? Remember the ‘Favorites’ folder? (it’s still there, in Panther, it’s just not in the UI so much.) Nobody used it, just like nobody uses it in Windows.

Also, you seem to have some slight misconception about Spotlight. It is file-centric. It only searches files, and the only results it returns are files. iTunes playlists, for instance, couldn’t be returned because they are not stored as individual files, but rather as part of the iTunes Library file. Likewise iPhoto albums, etc. [Though it’s entirely possible that this will change in iLife ’05, as that would be exceptionally easy to add.]

I’d also want to bookmark songs “by name” – so when I share the bookmark with somebody, they can find their own copy of the song. (Or does itunes have some way of doing that already? When the link-to-store bit came in, it seemed not…)

phil: I’ve read the developer documentation on Spotlight and have prepared some software for the transition already; it doesn’t work on just files but, rather, on anything you register with it.

As for metaphors, I want to expand them. I want to do away with favorites and use this in its place. A system-wide service, like Keychain. HTTP bookmarks, FTP bookmarks, iTMS bookmarks, FILE bookmarks, hell even mail bookmarks if someone wants to work that out.

And then iTunes .. it could easily convert the selection over. If I have tracks or albums selected then make a static playlist. If I have artists or genres selected then make a smart one with the LCD of the two (if I have any artists selected then make a smart one for those artists, otherwise the genre). Not hard to guess right most of the time.

Hell, I could make that an AppleScript tonight…

In iTunes 4.6 (at least), you can add iTMS tracks to a regular playlist. This is not quite what you’re looking for, but since it’s possible, you may find it useful.

I don’t remember when I started doing this, but I found it a good way to create a wish list — perhaps it was before 4.6, where we can now buy individual items from the Shopping Cart without having to buy the whole thing. Since the Shopping Cart acts like a playlist and you can save items to it for access from multiple computers (any that you sign into iTMS), it becomes a handy way to “bookmark” tracks.

I understand what you mean by bookmarking, and I do wish there were a way to do it by artist, album, genre, etc. Sometimes, you want to save a reference to more than one track.