The much-lauded iPhone goes on sale today. But for iTunes addicts, like myself, the telephone and Internet features of the device are just extras. The real draw is Apple’s promise that this is going to be “the best iPod ever.” As I wait for my new toy, I can’t help but look back and examine how I got to this point: I listen to almost everything through iTunes. My music collection occupies more than 900 gigabytes and includes about 200,000 individual tracks — which come from about 15,000 vinyl albums and 14,000 CDs. If I were to listen to sit in my living room and listen to it straight through — without leaving the house for food, sunlight, or live jazz concerts — it would take about two years and three months. My relationship with iTunes began when I bought my first Apple computer in early 2003. At first, my intention was to put the CDs I was reviewing for The New York Sun into my iTunes library. Then I began transferring music that I wanted to carry around on my iPod. I soon began putting all of my favorite albums into iTunes, and by the end of 2003, I decided to transfer everything into iTunes; if not every CD, then certainly every CD I ever planned to listen to more than once.

At the time, I fairly beamed with delight over how easy it was to chart an artist’s development. You can skip between tracks recorded in different phases of his career. You can listen and compare the way two different musicians approach the same song. You can isolate, for instance, all the Duke Ellington tracks that feature solos by Ben Webster — or make a playlist of Charlie Parker blowing the blues in E flat.

But relationships have to grow. In this case, the growth was in terms of hard drive storage space. My collection outgrew the original internal hard drive on my computer, so I began storing music on an ever-expanding series of external drives: initially USB, then Firewire (both 400 and then 800), and ultimately eSATA and RAID (a highly-technically advanced form of external storage with virtually unlimited capacity).

Gradually, this relationship started to have issues — or at least one major issue. After 100 or 200 gigabytes or so, the program becomes significantly slower. This is only logical: If you have all your books alphabetized by author, then you add a book by Jane Austen, you have to move your entire library of books a few inches over. Likewise, every time I add something or make a change (such as adding cover artwork) to my mega-library, it seems the iTunes program is moving the whole thing over a few inches.

The system slows to a standstill — and one sees too much of what’s known on Apple forums as “the whirling beach ball of death.” The wait for the program to implement these changes is measured not in seconds but in minutes. If I want to make a change to an album, I highlight the tracks and go out for a cup of coffee. It takes three to eight minutes for the info window to come up.

My solution, at first, was to get more computing power: in early 2005 I bought a PowerMac G5, loaded it with as much RAM as it would take (4 GB), and more recently bought the fastest internal hard drive that is being made, the 10,000 RPM Western Digital Raptor. The improvement in speed and performance is only slight.

The problem is not the hardware, according to the programmer, designer, and database expert, Steve Albin. It’s the way that the Mac operating system and the iTunes program have been built. The database portion of iTunes uses a foundation of XML programming, which is designed for very simple applications, not thousands of entries with dozens of fields. A superior iTunes would make use of a more robust programming language such as mySQL.

Ultimately, iTunes is at least two programs in one: It’s not just a media player, like QuickTime, but it’s also a database, like FileMaker. It stores the media files themselves as well as the information (the meta-data) that goes with them, and allows you to put them together into playlists or burn them into CDs. It also has a retail component, allowing you to buy tracks from the iT Music Store, thus it’s own version of a web-browser is also built in.

And iTunes was built mostly for people to load music onto their iPods, or maybe throw a few dozen (or even a few hundred) CDs onto their hard drives. It was not built to house entire music collections of 10,000 CDs or more. However, the fact that Apple has now released an 80 GB edition of the iPod is acknowledgement that the company is aware there are a lot of listeners with big collections out there. What’s needed is a new iTunes, re-built from the ground up, for the “advanced” music collector. There are different editions of FinalCut and other programs; the less expensive ones are aimed at more casual users, the more expensive ones are geared towards professional film-makers. We need something that might be called “iTunes Pro.” What I would save in time and frustration (and the lack of the spinning beach ball) would be well worth whatever Apple would charge. This would be even more exciting than the iPhone.

What’s more, there should be a professional music storage application for institutional archives. Some day, hopefully not far in the future, the Library of Congress, the Rodgers & Hammerstein Library of Recorded Sound (at Lincoln Center), or the Institute for Jazz Studies, will all make the move to transfer their collections to a hard drive to make their music more accessible. It’s easy to imagine that one such archive could put their whole collection on-line and be accessed by authorized users at another archive, or even at home. But it’s not possible with iTunes set up the way it is right now.

So far no one has developed anything better. As of now, I don’t think that anyone could. Which, at the end of the day, I’m sort of ok with: This is one relationship I want to keep.

wfriedwald@nysun.com