Itunes 7 released Options

[=trott=]

Apple just released Itunes 7. (for those who don't know it: their jukebox software and twin of the ipod)
You can get it at: the itunes homepage
Some new features:

• Gapless playback
• Can retrieve cover art
• Can write cd-text
• Now has an album artist field
• Colour scheme improved
• Has a new view allowing you to 'flip through' your covers like if it were a cd-rack
• Can manage ipod firmware

Based upon some of these features, you would almost say that apple took itunes 6, started reading HA, took all things people are bitching about and fixed them all. (About the only thing missing from itunes now seems to be an album gain mode for soundcheck...)

Update: Itunes 7.0.1 has been released and seems to fix most bugs/performance issues. (ipod syncing, cover flow issues and playback issues have been looked at. I also noticed a few sort modes 'album by artist' and 'album by year' I never noticed before)

This post has been edited by =trott=: Sep 28 2006, 07:37

[Axon]

itunes doesn't update album art for music that's already on the ipod. Poo!

[grommet]

The "gapless" iTunes 7 thread: http://www.hydrogenaudio.org/forums/index....c=48231&hl=

[BradPDX]

The album art feature works pretty much as advertised - if a track (or album) has NO ART, then iTunes will search the iTunes Music Store for some. If the tracks already have art, then it is left alone.

Accordingly, when you sync the tracks to an iPod, the new art comes along. And since no one would ever use an iPod as the exclusive storage mechanism for tracks (e.g., the tracks are always on the computer running iTunes) then this isn't a problem at all.

I have had some other problems with iTunes 7, but I expect to figure them out.

[=trott=]

Beware...One of the 'small snags' is that my (and according to apple's discussion boards also others) ipod 3G is no longer recognized...Here's to hoping for 7.0.1

edit: on my laptop using usb it works, on my desktop using either usb or firewire it does not.

This post has been edited by =trott=: Sep 13 2006, 20:05

[toology]

I suppose there is no way to use the album art feature in a country thats not supported by iTunes Store?

[greynol]

Beware...One of the 'small snags' is that my (and according to apple's discussion boards also others) ipod 3G is no longer recognized...Here's to hoping for 7.0.1

edit: on my laptop using usb it works, on my desktop using either usb or firewire it does not.

My 3G still works fine through firewire (haven't tried USB). Tracks on the iPod play gaplessly through iTunes, but not on the iPod. I've tried mp3s with lame tags and m4a files encoded with iTunes7.

This post has been edited by greynol: Sep 13 2006, 20:28

[kwanbis]

I suppose there is no way to use the album art feature in a country thats not supported by iTunes Store?

Do you think they verify where you are from?

[/mnt]

Itunes would be great if it used external artwork (e.g Folder.jpg) instead of internal artwork (jpegs embeded on id3tags).

And iTunes is a huge resource hog it uses about 6 - 8 percent CPU power to decode a MP3 on a Athlon 2000+ with 512MB. And it runs like Mozilla Firefox with shedload of flash animations running under X Window System on Linux with the kernel frambuffer display driver when you scroll the playlist or the ITMS browser, the rendering perfermance on iTunes and Quicktime is terrible and I throught Gtk apps (e.g Firefox with Flash) had really bad rendering speeds.

A screenshot of iTunes 7 (with default settings) + Task Mannger playing a gapless album:



This post has been edited by /mnt: Sep 13 2006, 21:41

[toology]

Well they don't verify it per se, but they ask for a credit card wich I unfortunatly don't have.

[PigsOnTheWing]

itunes doesn't update album art for music that's already on the ipod. Poo!

Look for 'Get Album Artwork' under the 'Advanced' menu in iTunes. Send updated tracks to iPod.

Jay

This post has been edited by PigsOnTheWing: Sep 13 2006, 23:22

[Maurits]

Well they don't verify it per se, but they ask for a credit card wich I unfortunatly don't have.

I believe you can circumvent this by using 'buy-and-click', you do need a iTMS account but not a creditcard. Or so I read somewhere, I have a CC and live in a country with its own store so haven't used this method myself.

[BradPDX]

I will verify that iTunes 7 works just fine with my 3G 15GB iPod via Firewire. Cannot comment on USB, but USB support on the 3G was a bit thin to begin with. Of course the old iPod doesn't support gapless and the like, but I didn't expect that anyway.

I am running iTunes on a very marginal machine (6 year old Dell/Win2000) and it is surprisingly snappy, feels faster then v6.0.5.

Can't wait to dump Win2000, I am so sick of that ugly OS....

[JunkieXL]

iTunes still has 2 programs running in the background at all times after installation though...

iTunesHelper.exe and iPodService.exe

It's a nice media player, but it's far too bloated for my tastes. I don't see any reason to update the old iTunes version I am currently using, as I have a 3G iPod and do not use iTunes for any playback or tagging purposes.

If the firmware update added gapless playback to my iPod... I would definately start using it but since it doesn't, these improvements are completely useless to me.
JXL

[greynol]

It seems you'll have to use iTunes7 should a firmware update ever become available for that 3G of yours. Hopefully such an update would provide for gapless playback, but I'm not holding my breath.

Regardless of your model, it looks like iTunes7 will be required to update firmware from this point forward.

This post has been edited by greynol: Sep 14 2006, 01:24

[Mirage2k]

Itunes would be great if it used external artwork (e.g Folder.jpg) instead of internal artwork (jpegs embeded on id3tags).

Actually, if you have iTunes 7 set to automatically pull album art from the iTunes Store, it will store those images in external files, and not embedded in the tags. If you already have art embedded in the tags, then, as a previous poster mentioned, it will leave it there (and copy the image to an external file, as well).

This post has been edited by Mirage2k: Sep 14 2006, 03:38

[quas]

A few tips for getting album art...

• If you live in a country where the music store is not supported, or you just don't want to give Apple your credit card info, you can use http://www.fakenamegenerator.com/ (it will generate valid-looking name and credit card data). I haven't examined the ITMS terms of use, so it's up to you to determine whether or not this is allowed.
• As far as I know, you can't directly export the album covers as JPEGs from iTunes. However, they are stored (on Windows, at least) in My Music\iTunes\Album Artwork\Download, in various ITC files. These are just JPEGs with some kind of iTunes metadata prepended. The image data starts after the string "data" followed by four null bytes; if you open up one of the files in a hex editor and delete up to that point, you'll get a valid JPEG. It would be trivial to write a script to collect all the ITC files from the iTunes folder, strip off the first few bytes, and spit out the cover images. Somebody's probably working on it already.

This post has been edited by quas: Sep 14 2006, 04:51

[AtaqueEG]

A few tips for getting album art...

• If you live in a country where the music store is not supported, or you just don't want to give Apple your credit card info, you can use http://www.fakenamegenerator.com/ (it will generate valid-looking name and credit card data). I haven't examined the ITMS terms of use, so it's up to you to determine whether or not this is allowed.

Link doesn't work

[quas]

Link doesn't work

It works fine for me.

[AtaqueEG]

Now it does.

Wonder why it did not work ten minutes ago...

[=trott=]

As far as I know, you can't directly export the album covers as JPEGs from iTunes. However, they are stored (on Windows, at least) in My Music\iTunes\Album Artwork\Download, in various ITC files. These are just JPEGs with some kind of iTunes metadata prepended.

That's pretty sick...I liked the covers inside tags. Now, contrary to the way itunes always worked they are not only no longer in tags but in another directory structure altogether

edit: interesting, when you add artwork using the art download feature it gets saved in this weird folder. If you then take that file, copy the artwork in the artwork view panel and immediately paste it again in that window, it gets written to a tag. Not very consistent behaviour...
edit2: then again, when trying this on some other files it did not add them to tags using this method...

This post has been edited by =trott=: Sep 14 2006, 07:34

[jimmy69]

the new album art views are great, but it's hust too slow and jittery. That wrecks everything they've added to it.

[giopiar]

Have a look at your iTunes folder in music (or where you have the itl/xml of library): mine is filled with a lot (56) temp files of the same contents as the xml library. When I clear them, they come back the next time I use iTunes...

Do you have the same issue?

[toology]

@quas : Thanks for the info generator, but its useless since it can't generate the 3 digit code for the credit cards.

[...Just Elliott]

@quas : Thanks for the info generator, but its useless since it can't generate the 3 digit code for the credit cards.

wouldn't work, they get looked up in a database. it was made to prevent this crap. Bug apple.