Itunes 7

2006-09-15

I installed itunes 7 with some mixed feelings yesterday: I was fully aware that it was not working as advertised for some people. Prior to installing I read about various issues people were having with disappearing files, crashes and sound quality. I had a good reason for upgrading anyway: version 6 never really worked well for me. Just yesterday I just couldn’t launch it. The process would start and then claim 100% of one of my cpu cores but no UI would appear. Not even after waiting 15 minutes. This happened several times to me already. Probably it is some weird conflict between quicktime and my hardware/drivers. So I figured version 7 probably wasn’t as bad or at least couldn’t get much worse. So, I fired up my backup script that syncs my music library with an external HD. After that I killed the itunes processes and fired up the installer. Pleasant surprise: everything worked. I was sort of bracing myself for random crashes but there weren’t any. Lucky me. If it wouldn’t have worked, I would have been able to roll back to version 6 (several posts in the forums explain how). So on to the review. Itunes 7, unlike version 6, is a major upgrade with several nice new features and small adjustments to the user interface. I like the changes. My favorite one is album art fetching from itunes (I signed up just for this feature) and the ability to flip through your albums graphically is just real nice. It just works (tm). Other nice touches include gapless playback (great for listening to Pink Floyd’s The Wall and Dark Side of the Moon), the new ipod screen which is selectable if you plug your ipod in, integration of podcast settings when you select the podcast screen.

One thing I would like is to be able to exclude compilations from the album view for the obvious reason that they are not albums (hence, no artwork or the wrong artwork!). Also I have a lot of shit there that I almost never listen to and which I don’t want to see when browsing my carefully collected albums (all properly tagged, naturally).

But overall I can’t think of anything negative and it didn’t eat my mp3s either! The latter seems to have to do more with luck than anything else. The Apple forums are full of stories of not so lucky people. But once apple fixes the bugs this is definitely a release to look forward to. If you install it, do it like me with a plan B.