On Tuesday, Apple released a new version (7.0) of their iTunes music software. Here are my first, shotgun impressions of it after a couple days of use.
Installation was painless, with no reboot required. I launched iTunes (with its new, blue icon) and was immediately greeted by a prompt informing me that iTunes was not my default player for certain file types. “Yes, I know this. I don’t want to modify my file associations, and please don’t ask me again,” I politely replied. While I much prefer being asked than having my settings hijacked, it would be nice if Apple would just see that I already had their previous version installed and assume I had my files associated how I wanted them. 
One new feature is the automatic downloading of album art. This is just awesome since I always tag my music with album art. However, there does appear to be a minor issue. If you let iTunes download the album art, the images are not actually embedded in the files per the file tag specs, but are placed in a specific directory. This is nice in that it saves space on your iPod since each image is only copied once per album. However, if you wanted to play those files in another application or on another portable player, the album art would not be present. I actually think this is an oversight that will eventually be fixed. If you go to “Get Info” and add the art there manually, it is correctly added to the actual files. No big deal for me though, as all my current music already has art, but the ability to easily download it for new tracks would be useful for me assuming Apple either corrects this or makes it an option to embed the downloaded art.
iTunes 7 and the new 1.2 firmware also support gapless playback. Gapless playback is pretty self-explanatory. You can now tag albums so that there will be no gap between tracks. It’s a great feature for live albums and those on which songs/titles should be played with no break between them. This is a very welcome feature and I am thrilled they added it. I tested it out and my concert CDs are perfect and Sgt. Pepper now sounds as it should on my iPod. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Oh, and umm, what took you so long?
IPod Updater is now gone. iPod firmware updates are now handled through iTunes. The new version 1.2 is out and adds some new features such as the capability to download games, screen brightness controls and various bug fixes. I did have an issue updating the firmware though. I clicked to update, the status bar said “Updating” but nothing ever happened. Finally, thanks to a suggestion over at iLounge, I got it working. What I had to do was go through the update and wait until it got stuck. Eventually, the iPod dismounted (went back from Do Not Disconnect to the standard interface) and I immediately unplugged and plugged it back in. This worked like a champ. Thanks to the iLounge community for bringing this to my attention!
A new feature of the iPod firmware that I am a huge fan of is the ability to browse alphabetically by letter when scrolling quicly through your artists, songs or whatever. In other words, if I flip through the A-B songs very fast, the iPod starts scrolling through the letters of the alphabet and then only displays the contained songs/artists when I slow down. This makes browsing for a particular track or artist way down the list much fast for those with large libraries.
As with any new software release or firmware update, there are undoubtedly bugs and quirks with it. I have read numerous reports of people having issues with the new iTunes, the firmware or both. Many of them end up being simply misconfiguration or misunderstanding of new features or terminology. Overall though, I have been very satisfied with both iTunes 7 and firmware 1.2 during my brief time witb it. Other than the initially annoying firmware updating problem I was having, I have had no problems.
Essential Link: iLounge (especially their Forums)
Tags: Apple, iPod, itunes, itunes 7, mp3, music
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Olga Curry
November 12th, 2008