iTunes 7 : Apple must be reading my thoughts, and I couldn’t be happier
Friday, September 22nd, 2006Recently I upgraded from iTunes 6 to 7 – with some subversions in between – and man, I’m loving it. Whenever someone is dominating, people got hate. Sometimes for real and sometimes to front. All the iTunes 7 haters need to step off. While the initial bugs are not fun, most of them are just quirks resulting from the changes in 7. In the cases of real bugs, they get fixed pretty darn quick. Is itunes 7 a flop? Fuck no! People are pitching a fit over what is a pretty standard process - not everything works perfect the first time. Most of the reports of bugs seems over-inflated, in part caused just by the fact that it’s ‘visually’ so different. It’s that whole psychology of having breaking the familiar and creating a sense of anxiety which creates the perception of problems real and imagined.”If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it” is the common invocation, but while I wouldn’t called iTunes 6 broke, iTunes 7 sure doesn’t need to be fixed anytime soon. Four & a half reasons to love #7: * Seamless playback between files (a.k.a. “Part of a Gapless Album” checkbox under file info) : finaly, I can play DJ mixes broken into multiple tracks without the painful stab of silence inbetween tracks. * Creating two new views - one that incorporates Coverflow and one that groups albums with artwork thumbnails : this could be two points but in short, both views are incredibly useful; “Cover Browser” (as they call it) is a great way to browse your collection with the Coverflow interface, now, without having an external application; “grouped with artwork” is great for me as I like to hunt down files that aren’t in albums and this makes my hours long works sessions of sifting through my music hunting stray songs that much more visually pleasant and slightly more efficient. * The interface change - while initially jarring - is that much better : not merely a superficial refresher, but it is easier to comprehend in the left bar area, plus the brushed metal was maybe becoming overdone, so the more subtle texture works; even shifting the logo and the file icons associated with iTunes from green to blue makes sense… that is after the feeling of betrayal washes away (similarities to Windows blue were confirmed with another Mac head). * The new “Album Artist” tag : another really useful feature for DJ mix albums broken into multiple files; it’s hard to explain this if you’re not anal about tagging, and a collector of DJ mixes as well, but imagine any compilation that is handpicked by a cool, notable person and you want to somehow retain this information with the compilation album, and the title itself doesn’t naturally include their name… what do you do? do you replace each tracks artist tag with the compiler/DJ’s name ? no, bad form - you like your information and you don’t want to pollute your files with confusing tag style. what if you added the compiler/DJ’s name as the ‘composer’? well no again, composer is for the person who wrote the song (which is not always the same as the performer), relevant for classical songs, cover songs, or standards. Album Artist to the rescue! I’m told that it also solves the problem where two or more artists have the same album title (e.g. the ubiquotous ‘Greatest Hits’). For these reasons I don’t even mind the slight speed hit (perceptible only on my 120+ gig music collection, my laptops 10 gigs has no noticeable lag). Big ups the iTunes team at Apple. Boh code selektahs!