Schinckel.net

Apple released version 7 of iTunes yesterday, and, since I culled my RSS feed list, I haven’t yet read a review of it. Unusually, I’ve already downloaded and installed it (I guess ADSL is worth it, then), and I thought I’d put my thoughts out there. It’s taking me a while to locate the icon in a list - I never realised just how much I’d become accustomed to the green notes - now they are blue. Still, no big deal there. I quite like the new sources list - having Music, Movies, TV Shows and Podcasts listed separately is good - it means I can clean up my library a bit more easily. It does make the sources list rather long, but a little more on that later. The most obvious change is the two new types of view: in addition to the list, you can group by album, or use the cover browser. The third seems pretty cool, but until the gapless playback determination has run, I can’t tell if it will be speedy enough on my setup. My music is all stored on a network hard disk, so the link here may be the bottleneck. Still, being able to flick through the covers is cool. I really like the other new view, which groups the tracks by album. I have come across a slight side-effect though. I have two albums with the same name, but by different artists. This means they alternate when in the standard viewing method, but this can be fixed by setting the Album Artist tag for each track. What’s coolest about this new view is that you can remove the album art viewer from the bottom left of the window, since this is now available in the main view. This allows more space for playlists, as I suggested above. Podcasts have gotten a nice couple of features. The first is that the number of new podcasts is shown like in Mail after the Podcasts source item. The second is that when downloading podcasts they appear in the “Downloads” list, rather than in the “screen” section at the top of the window. I don’t know if they’ve yet implemented resumable downloads, or the ability to alter the number of concurrent downloads. The new interface feels okay too, although they’ve broken system support for double-arrows at each end of a scrollbar. Overall, I think I like it. It will be interesting to see how speed goes…