Takumi's Blog

Apple’s new iTunes 7

“The most significant enhancement to the world’s most popular music jukebox and online music and video store since it debuted in 2001.” Has something in common with Tiger.

What might that be? I’ll get to that a little later, right now I’d like to try writing a review for it.

Interface

The first thing you’ll probably notice is the interface of the way iTunes displays playlists and album art. Most of you probably think Apple came up with the ‘cover flow’ interface for album art. But it was actually acquired from a developer named Steel Skies.

It’s actually quite nice, and it forced Apple to offer a way to download album artwork for your music library for free. However that download artwork service needs improvement.

As for the library, it is a lot more spacious, but you get used to it after a while. And overall I think they did a good job at helping you organize your own library better by differentiating between Music, Movies, TV Shows, and Podcasts.

Playback

The audio playback got a new feature called Gapless playback. What it basically does is find tracks in your library that were supposed to flow from one to another, and remove the gap that is usually there when you listen to it. I didn’t think this was a very big feature improvement. There was already a feature that is called crossfade playback which fades songs in an out of each other.

Video playback got the ‘floating control box’ like QuickTime Pro users get when playing a movie. It isn’t quite as nice as QT Pro, but it’s better than having to use your keyboard. It also adds the ability for you to go to full screen easily.

The New iTunes Store

You might notice that Apple doesn’t call it “iTunes Music Store” anymore. As part of their move to incorporate other types of media in the store, it’s just called the “iTunes STORE” now.

Steve Jobs reminded everyone of how the TV Shows originally started selling on iTunes there was only a few studios and a few series’ of TV Shows available. And now there are over 40 networks and 220 TV Shows available for purchase. I think he’s trying to say in a nice way: “The movie studios just want money, but we didn’t bend to their pricing agreements, and now they don’t want to provide movies on iTunes. The same thing happened with TV Shows. But look where that’s at now? Eventually the studios will learn and will sign our contract.”

So for those of you who don’t want to use it now because of the limited availability, just hang tight and the other studios will catch on.

Movie Playback

As I mentioned earlier, Apple added a nice control box over the video playback similar to QuickTime Pro. That works great, but the quality of the movie is worse than I expected. I was expecting it to be literally “near DVD quality,” but I guess my expectations were set too high this time.

With the MacBooks sporting a higher resolution display than the previous iBooks, of course you want to look at the movie in full screen. But then it gets a bit fuzzy. The movies are really meant to be played back on smaller displays, or iPods. I’d recommend to wait a little bit more before buying movies from the iTunes Store, until the quality is increased again.

As of now the store provides over 75 movies that Disney (and it’s subsidaries) have available. And you can also pre-order upcoming releases at a discount than buying it when it actually comes out.

Tidbits

• iTunes 7 provides a download manager to manage what files you are downloading.
• Apple also brought downloadable games to the table. I however don’t have much to write about this topic, as I’d prefer to purchase a PSP to play games on than play games on my iPod.
• A “View by Album” feature was also added, to view your songs “by the album” instead of just the list view or the Cover Flow view.
• The controls have been de-aquafied. Now they are similar to the iLife apps.

Go ahead and download your copy of iTunes 7 today. Overall, it’s a great piece of software.

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