Roger Fingas
A large set of Apple job listings posted on Tuesday suggests the company is looking to make major improvements to iTunes, particularly in search and music discovery at the iTunes Store.
One of the positions, discovered by AppleInsider, is for an search engineer who will "help build the next-generation of search features" at the store. The person is expected to be "comfortable bringing the latest in search and discovery ideas to production at a large scale."
The company is also hoping to fill five other iTunes Store positions, all of which involve software engineering or architecture. Two of them are engineering roles at the Music Discovery Services Group, with the aim to "build and enhance features driving the iTunes Store." Apple remarks that the MDS team handles features such as recommendations, iTunes Genius, iTunes Match, and iTunes Radio.
Apple's exact plans are unclear. Although the company is presumably hoping to make it easier to find and buy music and other media, it could also be working to integrate its upcoming on-demand streaming music service.
Another unusual opening is for a senior software engineer on the iTunes Media Services team. The successful candidate for the job will work on "next generation products that change the way millions of users consume video," according to Apple. That could potentially be a reference to a rumored subscription TV service.
Other iTunes openings call for people to work on "big data" reporting, content ingestion and encoding, and analysis of app behavior.
The new hires are unlikely to make any significant contributions in the short term. Apple's next big milestone is the Worldwide Developers Conference on June 8, and any Mac or iOS products shown there will likely be in beta or already complete.
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5 Comments
The key takeaway here is, "The new hires are unlikely to make any significant contributions in the short term" and it's not always necessary to do some kind of convoluted extrapolation to the next big Apple thing based on employment ads.
Yeah, I hate to beat a dead horse but iTunes is disappointing.
I threw "all-in" with iTunes 6 or 7 years ago and feel like I've only been rewarded with worse and worse user interface. There were some performance issues... I don't feel those now but perhaps more likely do to my new Mac Pro.
What I don't get is, sorting & storing media can be messy but we need it to be simple... I hate how the newest version buries the "list" views. I have all my movie artwork set up and I still don't want to see the "poster views" Apple seems intent on defaulting us to.
I wish I knew of a better program to deal with all this that I could easily convert to. :(
Click the "Playlist" setting and the sidebar is restored, same with the list view.
The search in iTunes is still dire. I hope they fill these positions PDQ.
So they're looking to hire Pied Piper? Here's to Middle-Out Lossless Compression!