Itunes 7 - What Do You Think?

http://www.apple.com/itunes/download/

Its been finally released.

I am using it right now, it looks much sleeker and easier to use as well as a bit more graphical and intergrated update tools.

 

I'd probably be pleased with it, if I could get it to work. I get the 666 error right after I accept the EULA. I rolled back to version 6 until someone figures out a work-around.

I've seen a few screenshots and I'm not too pleased with the interface. It doesn't seem as nice as the iTunes 6. I'll upgrade (eventually) regardless, but I can't say I'm excited about the interface.

I'm most looking forward to the separate music and video libraries. I hate going through my library and seeing a bunch of videos.

 

Actually now after using it some more, I find it to be somewhat sluggish.

 

I've noticed the same thing.

Volume Logic turned out to be the source of my frustration. I uninstalled it and now I can use iTunes 7.

I'm hoping that the slowness is only a side effect of the "Gapless Playback" scanning. I'm not sure if I'm going to benefit from whatever it's doing, but I figured I would see what it is.

How many songs do you have in your library? I'm just shy of 8,000 and the previous version handled that with ease. This takes a while to load the different artist pages, and I'm in the list mode.

Right now, my biggest complaint is probably the color. I hate how it's gotten darker. The nice blues have been changed to a blue/gray hybrid. It is kind of a drag.

 

I voted poor, even though I still use Itunes. They sort of screwed with it too much, the last 2 or 3 releases have caused more problems and made it run slower than anything. Still better than anything else in my opinion though.

 

Too slow and bloated; I never liked itunes. I prefer my music player to be.. well, just a music player; I can organize stuff myself.
And I just don't like apple programs.. Not that I'm discriminating against them or anything, but everything I've tried by them I just can't stand.

 

I haven't updated yet... when did this come out? My copy of itunes never asked me to update.

 

I'm a long-time iTunes user, have to say I have enjoyed every successive version. This one is the best. It may be slightly sluggish, but once you cycle through stuff a few times it is reasonably quick.

I have around 460 songs, and I like the new organization features - especially the grouped one where it shows the album artwork up top very large in a browsing fashion (right button). The second organization feature (middle button) is just like Windows Media Player.

One thing - it can use a lot of memory. I was using the cover browser, and it was taking 79MB. When only using the regular library, it's about 20MB, not bad.

Overall, very pleased, like the graphical interface, browsing features, and refreshed everything. Just speed it up a bit.

 

Exact same reason I rated it poor. Its great that they have implemented iPod Updater into it but they are cluttering it up nicely, and its just becoming a bigger resource hog.

P.S - the new blue itunes logo is not cool.

Just noticed that when you right click the Ipod name in the left bar there is no more "Update iPod" option. Omg why Apple WHY did you remove it? It was really good to just click update ipod if you change a song or something and now I got no way how to do it.

Argh...

 

they just changed update to sync, not that difficult is it?

I have to agree with Chaz, i don't use itunes to play videos though, and probably never will, but it does work well to play videos, i just am too set in my video playing ways. it is just still a great way to organize and play music,

the new interface for Ipod is just easier, everything is basically the same, but all the setting is right there for you now.

good update.

oh and I think they improved the sound enhancer it didn't work well with my Z-2300's but it really seems improved on this one.

 

Until they remove the stupid code to have it autostart and hijack your file structure, I, for one, won't touch it.

 

you can disable that you know.

First impressions.

Color: Much better.

Layout: Nice

Sync: w00t! can copy down to my laptop when my desktop is 1084 miles away!

Games: Meh not forking over 4.99 for bejeweled

more when its not 4am.

 

gah... the sync wasnt what i hoped it would be.... its only itunes music that can be synced.... screw you apple.

 

I find the interface to be not as pretty as itunes 6.

I love the feature to "flip" through the cover art. I associate many CDs of mine with a particular mood, and seeing the cover art lets me automatically feel if I am in the mood for that CD. It also is a very cool feature, with them sliding in and out - and mainly, the shadow on the black surface = VERY COOL.

The ipod summary seems not to serve much of a purpose (other than giving apple something else to announce).

The library and plalists take up more vertical space. Leaves less room for artwork (if you don't like scrolling the source column).

I agree, the blue icon is not good. There is so much blue in computer software, I liked the green.....

Overall, I am quite pleased with what I have found to be the best freeware app around.

 

i am really impressed with this version of itunes - AUTOMATIC ARTWORK YEEHAAAA. The flipping through album interface is really impressive also, i like it. In my opinion its still as attractive as it was, but then i am an iTunes (not apple) fanboy.

 

I'm really enjoying it so far, have upgraded on both my OS X machine and my Windows XP machine. I definitely like the new cover browser (Apple acquired a third party program called Cover Flow, and I'm glad they did, since they got it down really well), although I probably won't use it all that much. I really also like the other enhancements like the automatic album art download (I tried a few Windows programs to do this kind of thing, and never got it working reliably). And gapless playback is a welcome addition finally (although it didn't seem to recognize some albums that I had that should be gapless, such as Dark Side of the Moon or Brian Wilson's Smile).

Also, a few other things I really like. I like the new "Download Progress" manager, seems like downloading purchased albums is now a lot faster, and it will download multiple songs from an album at the same time.

I also do like the new menu layout and organization, seems a bit more logical to me and less cluttered than before.

The new "Back Up to Disc" option is pretty cool too, it's something I've been putting off doing, and I'm glad to see it built in as a standard function.

The "Skip Count" tracking is kind of cool too; I can definitely see setting up something in Smart Playlists to start keeping track of music that I "skip" a lot (then I might do a batch rating of those songs as 1 star or something).

-Zadillo

 

The sync is a different feature, it's part of the new ability to sync purchased music from multiple computers (i.e. if you bought music from your work computer and your home computer, you can now more easily sync the same iPod).



-Zadillo

 

One thing i don't like is the addition of the ' [EXPLICIT]' message next to only purchase explicit songs and not all songs, and therefore i would prefer not to have it tbh

 

I think you can turn that off by going to the Preferences and in the General section unchecking "Show content ratings in Library".

-Zadillo

 

good man Zadillo. I had never had itunes set content ratings as default before.

 

I have an iPod Nano, and therefore cannot fit my whole library onto it. It seems i cannot view whats on my ipod now as i could with the previous versions. Does anybody know how i can do it?

 

Do you have it set to autosync? I think if you turn this off and click on your iPod, it should show you the list the songs you have (I don't have a nano to test this with though).

I think there's also supposed to be some options for these settings in the new "Summary" view.

 

its not set to autosync. im just going to have fiddle around with the settings. I'll post the answer

 

K, good luck. I was looking around on the iLounge forums to see if anyone else was having this problem, and I did see other people mentioning being able to browse their iPod's list of music after clicking on the iPod in the Source menu, so it seems like it is still something that should work as normal.

When you do click on your iPod, what exactly do you see?

-Zadillo

 

Aha! I have found it. One of the simplest things, makes me feel a bit stupid tbh but never mind.

You simply click the triangle next to your ipod to extend the iPod menu where you can then browse music, podcasts, playlists etc.

It works like a podcast drop down menu.

Screenshot One

Screenshot Two

 

I wouldn't have been willing to upgrade unless they managed to re-crack the "Fairplay" DRM (hehe, notice who posted that Slashdot article). Luckily they did... so I did. I think the new version is decent. Mostly UI changes and little of real substance.

~ Brett

 

I wonder, how easy (or difficult) is it to uninstall iTunes7 in case I don't like and reinstall iTunes6? That will be in OS X BTW.

 

Pretty easy, just delete the iTunes app and download the iTunes 6.0.5 installer and install it.

With Windows it's about the same except that you Uninstall iTunes 7 and then install iTunes 6.

-Zadillo

 

Yeah, honestly I have the opposite view on iTunes 7; I think the UI changes are nice but fairly minor (although as I mentioned before, I do like the integration of CoverFlow for album browsing), but there are actually changes of substance that address some longstanding issues with iTunes (gapless playback, skip count, an actual download manager, a standard function for creating a backup of your iTunes library, etc.). Personally at least I consider those to be fairly substantial, but just because they were annoyances in previous versions.

-Zadillo

 

so im going through and setting my album work, because most of my albums itunes doesnt have a image for. and now some albums are just white, how do i go about deleting this? any one know?

 

If it's actually a white image you should be able to just remove the album artwork (right click on the songs to do this). If it is just blan, it can't really be removed, but you could change it out.

It seems like the album artwork stuff still has some kinks in it. I haven't heard of it replacing it with a white image though, but I have heard of people where it isn't downloading album art that should be there.

 

found it, you have to go into the info page of the songs to remove the album art.

the album art still is a bit messed up but they are getting there. manual still seems to work better...

im only to b.....

 

Yeah album art is a bit better.

 

Its still a piece of crap that doesn't comply with standards. http://www.foobar2000.org

 

That's awfully biased.

I may not be an Apple fanboy, but the iTunes 7 is really good.

I find it easier to use than Windows Media Player. And its sleeker, the only thing is it doesn't match the rest of my Windows stuff

 

What do you mean exactly? I will definitely grant that iTunes doesn't handle some music formats like FLAC or Ogg. But I'm not sure that makes it a piece of crap. Certainly something like Foobar 2000 is a good choice if you use those formats to.

Not supporting all possible formats and "standards" doesn't necessarily mean something doesn't comply with standards at all. iTunes as an app does handle plenty of other standard audio formats like MP3, AAC, WAV, etc. and does at least offer a lossless codec that can be used if needed.

-Zadillo

 

Eh... it's okay. I don't really use iTunes all that much anymore. I have a PSP that all my music goes onto, so I sync to the Memory Stick via WMP11. It's nice that they're finally starting to clean up the UI, but WMP11 has been doing the album art organization since its first beta several months ago (I though it was Microsoft that copied Apple?). And actually, it's organization is better IMO (just look at the screenshot). Of course, iTunes does have the iTunes store... Urge just can't compete (though it is decent). And I really don't like the new colors in version 7. One of the reasons I liked iTunes before was because it looked like an OS X app. Now it just looks like a poorly skinned 3rd party Windows app... bad move. And I just find it to be much more cluttered overall than WMP11. The only reason I even have it anymore is for the 25 free Facebook downloads every week.

Of course... it is better than the debacle that is Sony SonicStage. I used it to sync music to my PSP before, and when I reformatted my computer, I did not realize that the ATRAC3 copy protection would mean that I would never be able to listen to those files again... BLAST YOU SONY! I don't have some of those CDs in working condition anymore. It's really a shame too, because ATRAC3 Plus has fantastic sound quality at low bit rates... much better than WMA, MP3, and AAC.

EDIT: Did I mention that it's slow too?

 

Mediamonkey is much better. Even syncs with your Ipod/any music device. I went from Itunes to Winamp to Mediamonkey. Been happy ever since.

 

Yeah, I had Mediamonkey for a while. The options were fantastic, I could do pretty much everything I could imagine. But it's UI wasn't all that great, and I can do pretty much everything I need with WMP11.

 

Well I'm not talking about supporting formats. I'm referring from a programming point of view. Apple being the huge company that it is, once its implements something its very hard to change or get them to change. It writes 'hackish' code then releases it the masses which then screws other players in the game.

Some technical problems:
-For one thing, it relies on unsync flag of ID3v2 tag header, rather than of ID3v2 frame header
-It seems that iTunes won't read ID3v2 frames which are after the APIC frame
-iTunes writes an invalid ID3v2 tag if you convert the tag to ID3v2.4 thus causing the ID3v2 frame size to be written as a normal integer instead of an unsynced integer
-Rewring metatags in iTunes then it tends to break the gapless tag which then comprises gapless playback for many other players. So in a sense, iTunes 7 introduced gapless for themselves and then broke it for its competitors

All in all, this might does not affect the average user or for you since you use iTunes. But it causes problems, inconsistencies, and general incompatibly issues when you develop for other programs. Several programs had to add optional 'hacks' to make it work /w iTunes such as MP3Tag or Foobar2000. Its rather annoying when users (i'm referring to a support fourm for these programs now) that seems all these other programs are 'broken' when in fact its iTunes. Perhaps iTunes personally do not implement actual standards, so that once people use it often, it'll discourge them from switching other players, who knows?!

WHY IS iTunes 7 SLOW? -> Memory Leak

Sure there is no question iTunes has fancy features and the sleek interface. Some of which are quite nice like the newly purchased 'CoverFlow' technology. You obviously know what I think of iTunes and I'll continue to think of it this way until it fixes its problems, not just to pick on iTunes, another shining example of poorly programmed app is Windows Media Player but I won't even get into this as its completely unrelated to the thread.

I don't just recommend Foobar2000 I'd recommend several other things other than iTunes:
Winamp
AmaroK
xmms
MediaMonkey

^^ all the above players can sync to iPods and other devices as well

 

Good call of the memory leak. After reading that article, I checked it out, and I can see that Album Art implementation seems to be the culprit. If you move into the Album art scroller, the memory shoots up to almost 140MB. And after that, even switching to the other views only lowers it to ~90MB... 3 times higher than what it should be (about 30MB). And I only have about 400 megs worth of music in ~90 songs. That's ridiculous. After loading, WMP11 consumes less than 20MB, sometimes less than 10MB. It never went above 60MB. And that's a beta. Honestly, Apple. Really dropped the ball on this one.

 

Except I don't think that iTunes 6 will be around much longer for download. I was thinking of reinstalling it from the installation DVDs actually.

AmaroK interface is by far heaps better than iTunes IMHO. It has its own problems with memory leaks and at least the version I run under Linux won't play with my nano though. I'd try it if it were available for OS X.

 

i give it mediocre, it has put on weight after each new version; this one though, contains soooo much error, and wth happened to the ID3tag? its becoming to complex, i don't need that, change em back!

 

Personally I don't like iTunes. Media Player 11 choosing from over 4k songs in my 'My Music' folder is simpler and the fastest way anyone can listen to music.

I don't like slow, cluttered software clogging my system when I don't need it.

I do like the elegant design though, but Media Center 11's black design is also appealing.

And LimeWire Pro will always be my music download source.

 

People seem to be having trouble with the speed of the new iTunes, but it doesn't seem to run any slower than 6 did, for me, anyways.

 

I do have one good thing to say about iTunes 7. It doesn't trigger the Basic Interface in Windows Vista as iTunes 6 does. Aero still works when you load up iTunes 7. But I still use iTunes 6 in my XP install.

 

I have a problem with mine where I hear Static Sounds when opening 2 or more programs while listening to iTunes.
(Firefox and MSN Messenger)

 

I've reverted to winamp 2.9x because it only takes up ~7mb of ram, has a nastalgic napster era feel, and for organizing it's all about Media Monkey, which works seemlessly with winamp. iTunes just got so slow loading my 30gb library and it never worked with my creative zen. Media monkey is faster, uses about 15mb of ram and i like the sync better for zens and ipods actually

 

Check out STP mp3 player if you just want a simple, straightforeward player. It mostly just sits in ur tray, plays music, and takes like no resources.
I'm still not sure whether I prefer STP, Winamp, or Foobar2000. =/

 

meh, its ok. it runs slower..which i dont like