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:

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)

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

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

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.

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.

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

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.

Do you think they verify where you are from?

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:

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

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

Jay

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.

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....

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

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.

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).

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.

Link doesn't work

It works fine for me.

Now it does.

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

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...

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

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?

@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.

Naah, it's not worth the bother... I'll stick to Cover Art Downloader!
In any case I don't like the fact that I can't download because I don't use the iTunes store.
Maybe I don't buy the songs but I'm an iPod owner, and thus Apple's paying customer!

Some people seem to be having audio issues with the new iTunes/Quicktime on Windows. For some this is resolved when changing Quicktime settings from 24bits to 16bits mode. http://discussions.apple.com/message.jspa?...3107876#3107876

Does this mean iTunes has 24bit output by default? Is that since iTunes 7?

I very much enjoy the new iTunes 7.
* The cover art funtion is just great. It makes it so easy to navigate your music archive.
* About time it got gapless playback as well.

Sample shot:

iTunes 7 is worse than the version 6:

The GUI visual is darker and harder to navigate.

It is "heavier" in your computer resources than version 6.

The "cover flow" feature doesn't work if you don't register for the iTunes store.

Songs started to skip during play back. I had to uninstall it.

it's obviously a matter of personal opinion ...


i like it much better


on the contrary, i feel it much more responsive


register with it then


don't have that problem

Skiping songs are obviously not a matter of personal opinion. It looks like Apple is starting to drop the ball.

Something about an Audigy soundcard issue I believe for the skipping. Set Quicktime to 16 bits, 44.1kHz and that may help. See Apple discussion forum threads for resolution ideas for your skipping problem. Hopefully a new iTunes release will fix it for everyone.

i meant that it pleayed ok on my 4 pcs.

The lag people feel upon installing it for the first time is just Itunes searching for cover art and catalouging it for the cd rack-like interface. After that, it actually takes up less resource than iTunes 6! And is not laggy anymore. So 1st time installers, bear with it while it scans your voluminous collection

The biggest problem I'm having with it is no sound in the rear channel of my 4.1 apeakers.

Carlcamper
The lag people feel upon installing it for the first time is just Itunes searching for cover art and catalouging it for the cd rack-like interface. After that, it actually takes up less resource than iTunes 6! And is not laggy anymore. So 1st time installers, bear with it while it scans your voluminous collection

Don't know about that but mine will not speed up. It is always constantly slow, it constantly forgets my setting in each window (yes I have turned the remeber view setting on) and it keeps on making my music slow and stutter. itunes 6 was better.

Also the lag from the first startup or two is from iTunes detecting gapless playback for each track.

Large collections = long time before iTunes is done its work. Just be patient.

I think you can just register with your apple id, which does not require a credit card...

I can't believe all the complaints I keep reading about the software. In my own experience with it on a Windows XP PC, and my G5 Mac at work, it is more responsive, more attractive, and many times better than any prior iTunes in many different little ways.

It was a HUGE update. Almost nothing remained untouched, so I don't doubt that some people are having issues, but I think every area in which it is improved is an important one, and we should be thrilled that Apple has continued to work so hard on a product that is already considered the market leader (that's rare).

Even little things like response time when resizing the window are vastly improved in my own experience. I used to move my mouse and wait for the window to catch up. Now it's fluid.

Also, I don't know what people are talking about with the whole 'having to register' with iTunes to use Cover Flow. That's simply not true. If you have album art on your music cover flow will use it. Auto-downloading from the iTunes store requires an account, but does not require that you buy anything. And there are a million other ways to get art. Personally, I scanned all of mine because I wanted it to be a uniform size and quality. (467 x 467 pixels at q-90 Jpeg w/ Gimp).

I hope Apple sees good comments like this along with all the whining and inaccurate accounts of how this product 'fails'. Seems like most people really don't understand the software and were just ready to complain from the moment they installed. It must really suck for them to have worked so hard on something just to hear people complain.

Adjusting Creative and/or Quicktime sets does not fix the skipping problem. Many people that say they solved the problem this way will find out that this problem is intermittent and will return.

Solution: uninstall this s**t.

Apple is dropping the ball. As days go by iTunes looks more and more like Windows Media Player.

I like all the changes so far for the most part. A couple of other things I noticed that I haven't seen mentioned yet:

• Inline field editing (as opposed to having to edit via "get info" context menu)
• Ratings require an extra click. This I don't like. Now to rate a song, it has to be selected. So one click to select it, one click to rate it.
• Playlist songs (regular, not smart) can be put in a specific order. I recall that used to be impossible before, instead having to sort by a particular column.

The cover downloader would be cool if it didn't require a damn credit card to use it. That's just ridiculous.

Inline field editing has been in iTunes since iTunes 1. Ditto for manual ordering of regular playlists.

Seing as dropping the ball has been mentioned so many times, let's use another word. I think Apple got lazy. Yes, the extra features are nice and they were needed in iTunes. Both the iPod and iTunes needed gapless playback, iTunes needed the ability to download cover art since every other mainstream meadia jukebox had the ability (WMP, MusicMatch, etc.). I think the two extra browsing modes are nice but I will continually use the list mode.

iTunes 7 actually runs smoother than iTunes 6 did on my notebook which runs Windows Vista RC1, 2GB of DDR2 RAM, and a 2GHz Pentium M processor. It actually takes up less resources to run iTunes 7 on my notebook than it did to run iTunes 6. Then again, this might have been a incompatibility with iTunes 6. My desktop is a totally different story. My desktop has a extremely old Pentium 4 processor at 2GHz with 256MB of DDR ram and Windows XP Pro. iTunes 7 is a extreme resource hog on my desktop. Before, iTunes 6 would use about 18% of my memory and 20% of my processor. Now, iTunes 7 uses 34% of my memory and 21% of my processor (mainly a memory hog). Additionally, my desktop cannot play any videos through iTunes what so ever. It can play them but it just doesn't have the hardware to effectively play them.

As for the audio issue, my notebook never had it. My desktop did, iTunes 7 would not play any tracks (purchased or ripped). The timer would start at 0:00 but it would never move. I actually uninstalled iTunes 7 (also removing any temporary files and registry entries). I then installed iTunes 6 and the audio issue was till there. Even more strange was that my computer no longer played audio through any program (WMP, foobar2000, etc). I then upgraded back to iTunes 7 and everything worked just fine.

As far as iTunes 7 looking more like WMP, I don't think this is really true. Yes, WMP11 and iTuens 7 look similar but I think that both companies were separately building their software. On the othe rhand, is WMP looking more like iTunes or is iTunes looking more like WMP?

Anywho, this update to iTunes is nice for my desktop but not really so with my desktop. I mainly use my notebook for audio purposes anyways so it doesn't really matter for me but it is still a pain not to use my desktop which runs other apps just fine (word, EAC, Lame, FireFox, WMP11, etc.).

what's an apple ID?

When I say it looks like Windows Media Player I don't mean it's appearance. I mean that iTunes is a bloated resource hog as much as Windows Media Player.

I discovered an annoying bug in iTunes 7 today. The damn thing will no longer allow you to drag cover art for multiple items. You can only do one at a time now. This is quite irritating, particularly when you're trying to add art to hundreds of albums (as I've been doing today). No previous version of iTunes ever had this bug.

Has anyone else had this problem? I'm using:

iTunes 7.0
OS X 10.4.7
iMac G5 2.1 GHz

What happened with the good old days when you could just:

cat *.wav > /dev/audio

shortest playback program ever.

Seriously, all those features take up resources...It's normal and to be expected...

That is certainly a matter of personal opinion...

A bit darker it is, but I think it looks great. And imo it is just as easy to navigate as iTunes 6.

Might be.
At least I have not noticed this on my 1.5GHz PowerBook with 1GB ram. Its just as smooth as ever.

So register then!

iTunes 7 have been playing for 40-50 hours here, and not heard a single skip.
Might be something on your side.

If you mean selecting an album in the Browser (with List View) and then hitting cmd-I then I have no such problem here, running:

iTunes 7.0
OS X 10.3.9
eMac G4 1.25 GHz
&
OS X 10.4.7
iMac G3 600 MHz

I know it's a discredited panacea but have you tried repairing permissions ?

I was having audio issues with iTunes 7 when I had iTunes playing in the background while another application (e.g. WoW) was also accessing the sound card. I managed to fix the issue by following the advice on this thread http://discussions.apple.com/message.jspa?...3107876#3107876