I love iTunes. No secret there. I tell every random person I meet that I love iTunes. I rave about rating my songs, adding album art, and about smart playlists and how they work so well with my iPod. It really is great software.

However, this doesn’t mean there aren’t things about iTunes that don’t drive me nuts. For instance, I really, really wish there support for smart keyword tagging. It just isn’t enough to assign a genre to my tracks. I need to be able to tag a song like this: acousitc, live, mellow, love song. That way I can create a smart playlist that includes all mellow acoustic love songs. I can take it a step further and say I only want songs with a rating of 4 stars or more from the 80s if I want to.

Now, I know I could just add these key words in the comments field in the ID3 tag, but this is really clumsy. It would be ideal if in the song info pane, you could see a list of all the keywords you’ve used before. That way you could assign as many of them as you want by clicking on them. Even better, there should be a way you could accomplish all this from the main window to make it as easy as possible to organize your music.

There’s a plugin available called Qloud, but it’s not available for Mac right now, and I’m not sure you can use the tags you assign to make smart playlists. I’ve signed up for their service, and they say they’re working on a Mac version. I guess I’ll just have to wait and see if it’s any good.