Using iTunes 8

As a kid, I already loved listening to music. This passion grew even more throughout my teenage years. When music was finally stored in computers, I liked the idea and started my own collection.

I used different applications to organize and play my music. From Windows Media Player, Winamp and Sonique, I loved them all… well, at least at one point.

Eventually, I got tired of having to jump through different applications each time new versions came out. I find that my lack of interest in these players owe more to just how they look and play, but actually has more to do with the overall experience.

I like to keep my music organized, from tags to ratings, genres to cover art… I would literally do them manually if need be, thinking that the task may be daunting at first, but as my collection grew larger, it would definitely pay off, which it did.

Enter iTunes. I actually didn’t own an iPod until about 2 years prior to discovering it, but I immediately developed a fascination with Apple’s music playing app.

Fast forward to 2008, and here we are with Apple’s latest offering, iTunes 8. There have been numerous features added to the application since I started using it, but today I will only tackle what’s new.

Grid View

This iPhoto-esque new feature (above) is a nifty little thing. I like to see my album collections in such a way that I don’t have to read the album names. Most of the time, just seeing the cover art is more than enough for me.

There is however a single caveat and that is having the same view with Podcasts. I usually have more than just one episode that I haven’t listened to. And having this feature obstructs me from seeing which ones I need to update (I do them manually). I know you can just double-click on the cover art and it will lead you to the same view, but sometimes I just can’t be bothered.

At the same time, I don’t want to have to double-click my way through all the differend Podcasts I subscribed to, just to see if I need to download something new. Thankfully, you can still revert to list view for any or all of your iTunes media.

Genius Playlists

If you don’t have an iTunes account (or don’t want to have one), then you will not be able to use this feature of having Apple “suggest” what songs go great with what you have.

Loading the service requires you to be connected to the internet and will take a while depending on the amount of songs you have in your collection. After that, its just a matter of right-clicking a song you like and selecting “Start Genius”. This will have iTunes randomly generate a set of songs according to the genre of the song you selected.

I have tried this several times and so far it has yet to actually come up with a playlist thatis good to my ears. It also tends to use a lot of songs from the same album, artist or both.

New visualizations

With all the music applications I’ve used in the past, I have yet to see a set of visualizations that actually do justice to the music I am playing. With the new visualization on iTunes 8 however, everything has been buried in the past.

Trippy and colorful, I like the fact that it really reacts to music as if it were fireworks synchronized with music. Try to watch it with really fast and loud music and you will know what I mean.

Availability

iTunes 8 is available now to all Macintosh computers running OS X version 10.4.9 or higher and Windows XP SP2 or later and 32-bit versions of Vista. There is also a 64-bit version for Vista 64.

Related posts:

1. App hunting
2. A whole new level
3. Apple on spotlight
4. The new iPod family

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