vowe dot net :: New iPod gear and a much improved iTunes

New iPod gear and a much improved iTunes

by Volker Weber

ipodtunes

I am not going to reiterate all the news that have been announced in Appleland today. Just a few thoughts:

The new Nano looks more like a new Mini. I like both the black and the silver one.
The new shuffle seems like nice idea. However, now you need to carry a cable/dock. The old one had a USB connector.
The improved 5G iPod looks old now. I would expect the next gen device to look similar to the silver and black Nano. My guess: January.
iTunes 7 has a ton of new features. Amongst them something that makes crippled music desirable for the first time: Syncing from the iPod to another computer. Imagine Apple would let you sync all of your music this way.
Now you can download album covers for free, if you log into the iTunes Store with your ID. This is a nice opportunity for Apple to mine some data from your collection.

2006-09-12 :: email :: bookmark :: digg

Comments

This new iTunes 7 is a fantastic development.

The additional support for album artwork is a major step-up and the whole music library performance is magnitudes better.

Ben Rose, 2006-09-13 00:53

Fantastic? Surely not for old hardware. On my Athlon 1800 I notice a significant increase in CPU usage when it's just playing a song, from 2 to 5% it went up to 10 to 20%.

It is understandable when things like Coverflow consume a lot of power but why should simple playback suddenly be 4 times more CPU intensive?

Oliver Regelmann, 2006-09-13 02:02

Whilst the coverflow view is pretty and fun to play with, I'm finding the other the new display option with the album artwork next to a list of the songs particularly nice.

But the two most useful features, syncing of music between computers via an ipod AND automatic downloading of cover art are both linked to an iTunes Store ID.

Making both new features completely useless if you live in New Zealand (like I do) where the iTunes music store, an thus iTunes Store ID's, are unavailable. Worse than useless really since everyone else seems to have it and love it.

Daniel Wright, 2006-09-13 08:29

@Oliver
at my systems this increase was only remarkable through the initial scan through my libary (8000 songs). After that scan it went down and only a little bit above the 6.x version. But memory usage went up to 90MB from 60MB (comparison directly after the start with no playing around , importing, renaming).

So quite good, but unfortunatelly the installer had a problem with the uninstall of the old quicktime installation. That worked from 4.5 through the different version of 5/6 but not today with 7 !
It took me 5 hours to find a resolution for the upgrade or better for the quicktime uninstallation. Tricky job but with microsoft "Installer Cleanup Utility" I could do this after I found out how quicktime was registered.
Not as Apple Quicktime, Quicktime, itunes Quicktime or anything similiar - it was an application only called 7.1 , but 7.x could also be something like Notes 7.x!

Crazy, if you want to uninstall it you have to know what acronym apple uses for their quicktime.

Wolfgang Fischer, 2006-09-13 14:46

Ordered the new shuffle for my mom yesterday. As promised, it will ship during October...October 31!

Should be great for her though - she's not technically inclined at all, so I'm having it shipped to me so that I can load it up with music for her and all she needs to do is press play. That's the beauty of Apple.

Amy Blumenfield, 2006-09-13 17:32

@Amy Blumenfield - I did the same thing for my mother, but with a 4GB Samsung MP3 player. All she does is turn it on, select a song, and push play.

Charles Robinson, 2006-09-14 19:21