by Philip Lop

Created on: September 15, 2010

iTunes may be the market leader when it comes to downloading music and film, but the interface is legendarily unpopular. Increasingly complicated iterations of the software seem to clog up the processing time more and more, and a simple search can take far longer than the patience of your average consumer is prepared to endure. The Search function on iTunes is seldom very quick and on a slower than average ADSL connection, it’s not uncommon for the process to time out before it can complete.

iTunes Instant may just be the answer to this problem. Developed by fifteen year-old programmer Stephen Ou, iTunes Instant is a predictive search utility that provides suggestions for products from the iTunes store based on what the user enters in the main search bar. iTunes Instant starts looking as soon as you start typing and works in much the same way as the new Google Instant search, which returns a constant stream of web results and images based on a few key strokes.

iTunes Instant is certainly not as dynamic as Google Instant. The results don’t appear as quickly as they might do for Google Instant, and the search bar doesn’t retain a history of previous keystrokes so it’s less like a conversation between you and your computer. There’s no capability to register and therefore build up a history of searches to help inform more accurate future processing. The volume of results returned is greatly limited too, with just the top nine results presented back to the user, as opposed to the limitless suggestions provided by Google Instant. The results are nicely presented though in a simple grid of the twelve top results, each displayed with the official cover art, regardless of whether it’s a music download, music video or movie.

There are limits to what the search can find. Apps for the iTune, iPhone or iPad don’t appear in the search, so enter the words ‘Angry’ and  ‘Birds’ and you’ll get an album by Ben Stewart rather than a picture of one of the App Store’s most popular games. Audiobooks don’t appear either, but Podcasts do and, in fairness, in this way the search currently focuses on the most popular products on the market (and there’s a separate utility for the App Store anyway).

Once you’ve found something that you think you like the look of, click either the cover art image or the product name to be taken to the iTunes Preview part of the Apple web site. This allows you to see the same information that you would in the iTunes store as well as playing a short preview of the track (exactly as you would in the iTunes store only with normal page loading times.) You only actually need to go into the iTunes store once you’ve decided that you want to make a purchase and then you just click the View in iTunes link and go from there. The process cuts out any time spent wasted in the iTunes store and, whilst it might introduce new steps in the process, it’s otherwise pretty quick and efficient in comparison to one of those unwieldy iTunes searches.

All in, it’s a useful free utility and certainly worth adding to Favourites/Bookmarks for regular iTunes store customers.

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