Apple has released iTunes 4.8 for download.

What's new:

iTunes 4.8 includes new Music Store features and support for transferring contacts and calendars from your computer to your iPod.

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

It organizes and plays videos as well. Perhaps a sign of things to come?

Maybe we can expect video iPod soon? Who knows. I haven't been able to try this version myself because I'm still downloading it (god bless good ol' 56k). I'm more looking forward to VBR encoding.

does itunes 4.8 support encoding into aac vbr?

No. It only includes QT 6.5.2 for Windows, so maybe there will be a 4.8.1 when QT7 is released?

Bleh. Anticlimax.

What about us Mac OS 10.4 users? We now have both QuickTime 7.0 and iTunes 4.8!

Edit: Installed iTunes 4.8 and I see no vbr settings.
Only the usual 16-320kbps cbr options

v 5: Featuring all new revolutionary Stop button. Upgraded FairPlay to block Real. Bug here and there. QT 7, well, wait till Mac users get bored.

Yes, but they have to maintain feature parity

I just ripped a CD in 4.8 @ 192kbps and played it in foobar. The bitrate was varying a bit (174-204kbps). I remember reading that iTunes actually uses ABR encoding, I assume that's what I'm seeing here?

oh... i was just using itunes 4.7 and found something i couldn't do.

I wanted to slect 20 - 30 songs and copy all there ID3 1.x tag to their 2.x tag...

It seems itunes doesn' have this function. Does 4.8 add it?

Or any other program recommand?

QT could do silence detection, and nothing more IIRC. So if it really is varying, it sounds like they updated it. However I don't seen how thats possible without QT7. Are you running the Mac version?

No I'm using the Windows version. It doesn't vary that much all the time, it usually just stays around 185-195kbps and occassionally it will go a little higher or lower than that, but it is constantly varying.

It's ABR. My files behave like that as well. It usually stays around specified bitrate, but it can go a bit off for a bit. We have to wait for QT7.

A few initial reactions to the iTunes video support.

1) I noticed that, when right clicking on a video, it still gave my the "convert to" option. Sure enough, I can choose "convert to" and it will convert the video’s audio stream into whatever format I have chosen. And the first frame of the video becomes the album art for the newly created track.

2) It's slow when a video is player. If I try to do anything while playing a video it will be slow, stutter, or sometimes freeze for a few seconds. iTunes has never been good at handling multiple tasks you ask it to do without performance stutters, so no surprises there.

3) Not much of a surprise, but it wont let me import avi's, and the mpg's that it lets me import wont play (guessing it only can play certain variations of mpg). Only QuickTime files that I have lying around my computer have worked so far.

4) When I have a video playing in a separate window, I see no way to use hotkeys to enlarge to 200% and beyond. I can only maximize the window and/or enlarge/shrink it using the corners of the window.

No Australian store for this release. Not that I would use it, as I prefer to have lossless copies, but it would at least make listening to music on iPod's legal in Australia.

Currently, Australia has no Fair Use provisions in its copyright act, thus it is illegal to rip a cd (or convert any copywrited work from one format to another).

Yeah, that is cool as heck. But it was also in iTunes 4.7, along with video support. At least for some videos, like you figured out.


Anything which quicktime can play natively (without resorting to a DirectShow codec) should work in iTunes. Although it probably does have extension limitations.

You might not have noticed it, but iTunes can organize PDF files as well. It can associate them with an album. They used this capability for the U2 promotion, by including all the liner notes and such in with the download as a PDF file.

The big new thing in 4.8 with video is not that it can organize and play video.. that's not new. What's new is that you can download video from the iTunes Music Store. Several albums have videos associated with them and when you get the album, you get the videos as well.

To try this on the cheap, check out the latest single from "Gorillaz" on the iTMS. The single is "Feel Good Inc". You can go to the iTMS, find the Gorillaz page, and click the "Video Single" link at the top of their page. It has the one song and 4 videos in that album. Buy the "album" for 99 cents, get the 4 videos along with it.


BTW, they're using "MP4" for the extensions on these downloaded videos. So the defacto extensions seem to be:
M4A/B/P = Audio
MP4 = Video + Audio

Previous versions didn't organize movies in your library. The only video support in 4.7.1 was to watch trailers and music videos on the iTMS.

hehe, .mp4 is after all the only extension covered by the mpeg-4 standard (also for audio-only)

are the videos playable in quicktime 6? are the videos playable by other .mp4 players, like videolan or mplayer too?

are there any links to free itunes .mp4 videos?

I know, however I agree with Apple on this one. A separate extension for audio-only mpeg files makes more sense, given that extensions control so much functionality in existing operating systems.


Yes, yes, no.

Oh, duh. Can't believe I didn't think of that, figuring how the two are bundled together.

And yeah, I knew about the PDF support. Great feature.

As far as I can tell, the video files have no DRM on them.


I'm surprised they didn't just wait to bundle videos with songs until Quicktime 7 is available for Windows. Then they could have made the videos H.264's. I bet future videos available will be.

Does anyone know if real CBR AAC is possible?
From what I understand CBR AAC is always gonna be a "real tight" ABR.

2 issues here:

1) Yes, it's possible to make the used bits for encoding each frame constant, by not using the bit reservoir at all. I would hope that no real encoder (for MP3 or AAC) uses or allows this mode of operation, since it's really completely pointless and would significantly lower the quality.

2) The bit reservoir won't cause what you are seeing here. And saying that CBR is "real tight ABR" is deceptive, since "CBR" is a term defined by the respective standard. CBR is not ABR, it's CBR!