iTunes 7 is Great, and it Drives Me Nuts
Posted by Patrick on Friday, September 22, 2006Taking a momentary break from our streak of North Carolina posts here tonight. More posts on that subject in the future.
Tonight I'd like to talk about a program that I think is great, and at the same time, totally drives me nuts. I've spoken about the music playing program in the past. The recent release of version 7 seems like a good time to talk about it. 
I downloaded it on the day it came out.... which is usually asking for trouble, but the features advertised made it pretty tempting. I've been using the program a lot during the day, now that I'm working from home.
What is Great
A few new features of this program are great. One moderately great thing is the new way the library source list is organized. Everything is separated out in an easy to read way. The number of unlistened podcasts is now displayed, which is kind of cool.
Another great thing is the once separate program Coverflow is now built right into iTunes. Being able to flip through music like this tends to make me listen to albums that I haven't heard in a while, adding a visual element to the listening process. When Coverflow was a separate program, I blogged about it.
One other thing that I thought was cool was iTunes showing the cover art next to the list of songs for each album. This is pretty slick, and probably should have been in the program earlier on.
The last great thing is a backup feature that's built in. Click the menu item, and iTunes will back up all your songs to DVD-R discs. For someone like me who has all their music on a hard disk (having long since sold most of the CD's), this is nice to have.
What Drives Me Nuts
The Coverflow feature is great, but it also drives me nuts. It's much slower now that it's built into the iTunes program. The flipping is not as fluid, and it ends up showing blank boxes for albums without cover art associated with it, and that's kind of lame. I guess it's a camera in a cell phone. You've got two things, but neither work as well as they did when they were separate units. Or something like that.
Speaking of slow, man has this software slowed down. Scrolling through the list of songs takes at least a second to start after clicking*. It's no so bad on the iBook, but on my Windows desktop it's almost unusable with other programs running.
Another new feature, while ambitious, seems not-quite-ready to go. iTunes will find album cover-art for your songs, which is very cool. This makes the Coverflow feature better, but iTunes often makes wild guesses on just what cover should go with what album. At one point it was downloading the covers of Beatles albums and displaying them with Black Sabbath tunes. I don't need that kind of confusion in my life.
Another thing that drives me nuts - instead of attaching the cover art it downloads to the individual song file, it creates a separate folder on your computer and makes a file for each album cover. And, not a .jpg or .bmp file, which I can deal with. It's an .itc file. I tried to open this album art file in Photoshop, and was promptly mocked by the software. These many extra files add unnecessary clutter to my computer, takes up more space then necessary, and if you move the music files to another computer, the album artwork doesn't come with it. Weak.
More Great Then Nuts
iTunes is still, to me, the way to go for playing music. I guess the way its organized is the most appealing thing to me. It feels like Excel (a program I use frequently for my work, far above and beyond accounting and goofy pie charts) in the way it arranges music into columns and rows. Also it's ability to easily stream (think "broadcast") the music from the hard drives in my desktop to the laptop wirelessly is super sweet and super easy to use.
As for as upgrading, I'd say if you're still using version 6, stick with it for now and wait for Apple to put out some kind of 7.xx update. Hopefully some bugs would be worked out and the program will have sped up a bit.
*Really, it doesn't drive me nuts. It's a slight aggrivation in my otherwise super-easy middle-class life.
Labels: iTunes
There are 1 comments! ≡
