While I personally don’t think it’s worth the upgrade others might…
Well I’ve seem to have to have changed my mind on that.
Three views for your music.
I stated in an earlier post that I, personally thought that iTunes 7 wasn’t worth downloading, well I seem to have eaten my words over the weekend. I did download it when it came out of course because I’m an Apple fanboy and I’ll download any new application or update from the big guys but my initial impression was not good and I realized I didn’t give it a chance to set in with me.
What’s new?
iTunes
7 now, does what iTunes 6 tried to do but a little better - seperates your library into clear and definable sections. It has Music in one, Podcasts in another, and TV Shows and Movies also standing on their own, iTunes 6 mixed them all into the general Library.
I think the breakup of your library into sections like this is very useful instead of having to search your entire library for one little video clip (or feature film) like you would have had to do in iTunes 6, iTunes 7 you can just choose what type of item you’re looking for and just search via that division of your library.
Coverflow
Coverflow View.
I never got to use Coverflow pre-iTunes 7, and I wasn’t aware that they were ever bought out by Apple until the release. But Coverflow is now integrated into iTunes (I’ve heard some claiming a rip but didn’t realize that Coverflow is in on it), and it looks quite nice and fits into the UI perfectly.
The Coverflow view as it’s called lets you browse your (free*) high quality album artwork in the iTunes interface. With a reflection of the artwork and a 3d-ish cover as well. It looks very nice, very high quality and worthy of being used, it’s also quite snappy, not very slow at all.
Skip Count
No idea.
There’s also a new thing if you hit Command+J when viewing your songs, there’s now a radio button for a Skip Count column, I’m assuming I know what this does but I might be wrong, but I didn’t have it checked so I don’t care about it.
Built In iPod Manager
iPod Manager in iTunes.
This is a God send! I’ve been waiting for this forever, finally we can eliminate the standalone app for updating and restoring your iPod, it can now be done right from iTunes, along with now you don’t have to open the preferences.
Notice the absense of “iPod”.
The preference tab for iPod has disappeared with the introduction of the built in manager which I really really like, although I don’t currently have an iPod to try it out with but I will (hopefully) soon (2g Nano).
iTunes “Store”
Movies AND music!
I shouldn’t have to even mention this about the new iTunes, but the store has been majorly updated to include not only Music, Audiobooks, TV Shows, and Podcasts but now full length feature films (only from Disney companies at time of publication). This is big, not only did they bump the resolution from 320×240 to 640×480 but the fact that Apple now sells them for a fairly competitive price. This is to sway you from actually buying the physical DVD but the download so you can take it with you (iPod), watch it on the couch (Front Row) or just sit at your desk at work (iTunes) and enjoy a full DVD.
New releases and catalog go for $9.99, pre-orders for $12.99. Very good price, especially for a pre-order movie which is released the same day as the DVD hits stores.
Remember the Titans for $9.99.
Summary
The new iTunes, now that I’ve given it time to sink in with me, is very advanced, very “pretty” and extremely useful and organized, I’m now glad that I’ve gotten into it and that I’ve discovered the fun and new stuff inside the app. I’d like to say I’m very happy with iTunes 7 and I’d like to change my previous statement to say the following:
I’d recommend iTunes 7 to anybody!
* Assuming you have an iTunes account.
Play count counts how many time you play a song, skip count counts how many times you skip over it when it comes up in your library.
Merci.
The only thing that annoys me is the stupid styling on the scroll bars. Keep a unified UI? Pah.
I haven’t updated yet (waiting for BlackBook awesomeness) but I still think that 9.99$ is a bit too much for an “iMovie”
But I do like to play it safe and make sure I have backups incase my HDD dies AND my backup drive dies (one of these days!)
My other quibble being that they haven’t even launched a TV Show download-service in the UK/Ireland and its a little dissapointing to see that there won’t be any movies here either.
Cheers for the review and how does CoverFlow run on the GMA 950?
Enda,
It runs just fine like I said. No hangs or anything :).
I like the interface for your ipod. It displays all of your current ipod info (version, playlists, etc) as well as the space usage by category both graphically and numerically.
I’m glad to see that someone’s loving and eating their words about the new Itunes 7. Unfortunately for most of us, we’re not having the luck you’re having. I find that the sudden crashes and audio playing extremely slow ( i mean it’s like the tempo has been reduced significantly) are making me angrier by the second. Here’s the kicker though. I had to unistalled 7 and re-install 6. Everything worked fine until, “me” happy that they’ve “worked” out the glitches, decided to upgrade to 7.0.2. Alas, it does the same damn thing as 7. Good looks Apple. Good frigging looks..