iTunes - Powerful media purchase and playback tool
Sep 13, '06 07:30:00AM
Contributed by: robg
The macosxhints Rating:

[Score: 9 out of 10]
After catching up last week, I intentionally held off on this week's Pick of the Week until after Tuesday's Apple announcements -- just in case something really neat was released. And obviously, there was a lot of cool stuff yesterday, including my personal favorite, the iTV home theater box. But since that's hardware, and not shipping, it's not a valid Pick of the Week selection.
iTunes, however, is eligible. And in looking back through four plus years of winners, I noticed that I'd never selected iTunes. The release of version seven is a very good reason to end that omission. Yes, I know that iTunes is the 900 pound gorilla of music players, and that it faces no real competition on the Mac side of the world. But it's still a very good program, and version seven makes it even better, in my opinion, and well deserving of PotW status.
Here are just a few of the reasons I find the new version compelling:
- The new interface. I love the dark scroll bars, the reorganized sidebar, the dark highlight banner, and the new 3D album cover browser interface (which was purchased from these guys, in case you didn't know). I hope that this new look (excluding the album cover browser) is indicative of how most apps will appear in 10.5 ... and I know many will disagree with that statement, since every version of the OS X application UI seems to split folks nearly equally into "love it" and "hate it" camps.
- The organization of the sidebar. I like the groupings by Library, Store, Devices, and Playlists. I just wish I could collapse the Playlist section, as you can albums in iPhoto.
- Multiple library support. While I hope for the day when we can have true multiple libraries within iTunes itself, the basic support for multiple libraries is a good start.
- The new iPod management screens. Wow. What a change. In previous versions of iTunes, iPod management almost seemed like an afterthought. Not any more. The new management screen and tabs take all the guesswork out of managing my iPods.
- The new Store menu. It's nice to see all the store functions gathered in one location.
- The re-do of the music (and TV and movie and video) store. The new layout is much easier to work with, with clearly defined stores for each type of product sold.
- Easy backups. The File: Back up to Disc option makes it really easy to back up your music to DVDs or CDs. It will even do the necessary splitting automatically; from iTunes' help: "iTunes burns the number of items that fit on one disc, and then asks you to insert subsequent discs to continue burning the remaining files."
- Computer-to-computer syncing via iPod. Excellent! Now it'll be easy to keep my two main machines in sync without relying on third-party tools.
- Gapless playback. I don't have a ton of gapless stuff, but it's nice to know that I can now listen to it without sound breaks.
- Automatic album art. iTunes has always had great album covers, and now they're giving them to us for all our ripped music. Thanks!
There are obviously still areas for improvement, but overall, I'm quite satisfied with iTunes, especially in its latest incarnation (though I could do without the return of the blue application icon).
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