iTunes 7.0 First Impressions

September 12th, 2006

Apple Here are some notes on my initial experience with iTunes 7.0, just released today:

On initial launch, iTunes had to plow through my entire iTunes library calculating “gapless playback information”. It took a while on my aging G4 Mac; likely much faster on newer hardware.

There’s an option for iPod games in the General Preferences, so it looks like your iPacMan and iTetris are downloaded and managed using iTunes.

The interface has a more subdued metal sheen to it. There are many graphic tweakes; more on this later.

The left partition’s main categories (Library, Store, Playlists) now appear in all capital letters. They aren’t selectable. When an item is selected in this area, a dark blue bar with an almost black stripe appears across its middle. Not sure if I like this element.

Another kind of snarky touch are dark blue gradient colored scroll bars, that as a result resemble plastic sliders. I’m reminded of the plastic “ZOIDs” we had as kids. Some are already theorizing that these UI changes are a preview of what’s to come in OS X 10.5. I’m already wondering about a grey plastic Mac with dark blue rubber bumpers.

There are three views for browsing the tunes, a list view, a cover
art image plus list, and last a “cover flow” option.

The cover flow style is quite impressive. Album art appears as a series of images standing on end, running from left to right. You can flip through them manually or using a scrub bar beneath. It’s quite slick and an easy way to visually identify all your music albums. This cover flow UI also shows up in the iTunes Store movie section. It’s pretty fun, and at the very least, rewards all of us who have invested hours of time gathering the album art for all our MP3s.

Under Preferences -> Parental, there are options to restrict movies and TV shows in your iTunes library to standard MPAA ratings (G, PG, R, etc.).

Under View Options there appears “Last Played” and “Last Skipped” criteria. This could be useful for a smart playlist identifying songs that haven’t been played during the last month, for example.

The view for iPod settings is much improved in terms of functionality, with tabs and a really slick graph showing how much iPod storage space is occupied and by what. The colors will take a bit of getting used to; it looks rather kid-like for some reason (ZOIDs).

Another annoying surprise, iTunes then had to plow through all the songs on my iPod for the ever-important “gapless playback information”. This took a long time.

All in all, iTunes is a solid* program having just about all the functionality and ease of use I can imagine. Therefore, the path into the future is mainly adding more functionality while not screwing up what’s already there. I don’t think that’s likely as at this point iTunes will likely just be expanded to manage different kinds of media and associated metadata, such as electronic books, magazines, and software.

*It seems a lot of people are having serious problems with iTunes 7, stability, cover flow not finding the right images, purchased music not playing, iPods freezing up. All I can say is that I haven’t experienced any serious problems since installing it a week ago, now. I’ll have to put it through some paces over the weekend and see if I have any problems, which may then warrant another blog post.

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