iPod Event and iTunes 8

As most of you know, 2 days ago was the Apple iPod event that I (and many others) posted about. Well now that the event is done and dusted, what has come out of it? In short we saw iTunes 8, a new iPod Nano and a new Touch (plus some new headphones but they don’t count). Because these will require a fairly long post all together I have decided to split them. This one is about iTunes 8, the first new product I got my hands on.

Before I start I would just like to point something out: *cough, cough* (kevinrosewasright…)

Browsing

The new browsing feature in iTunes 8 is a grid view. While this is a fairly obvious feature and one that is available in other media players (such as Windows Media Player) it has taken until version 8 of the world’s most popular digital jukebox for it to arrive. Before now, I didn’t feel like I needed grid view but now that I have it, I’m not going back. I think of it best as a comfortable mix between Cover Flow and the list view with albums covers. Music is viewable in the same categories as were previously available: artists, albums, genres and composers. For those who don’t wish to flow through their music with ease, the list view is still available. Cover Flow has been drastically improved. Where as before when Cover Flow would lag if you scrolled fast, now it breezes through albums with no hiccups.

Genius

Genius! I love Genius!! Genius is a brand new feature to iTunes 8 that attempts to mix the world’s of Pandora and Last.fm with the smart playlists already available. What Genius does is analyses your entire music library to tell you what music goes great together. This is not a process that just analyses your music alone, Genius synchronizes with Apple’s database containing millions and millions of other data like yours, making the analysis more accurate. All you have to do is select a song, then hit the Genius button down the bottom right of you iTunes window to create a Genius playlist. This new playlist suggests a list of songs that sound great together. My personal experience with Genius has been great, the playlists it creates contains songs that I wouldn’t have put side by side but now I can see why. Choosing ’15 step’ by Radiohead gives me a playlist containing Bloc Party, Coldplay, Madonna, The Fray and even Bob Dylan. The oddest sounding playlist that makes perfect musical sense. You really have to try it for yourself but be warned, some haven’t had the best experience with it so far. As time goes by, Apple’s database will grow and evolve and so will the Genius’ recommendations.

Podcast Management

Something overlooked by nearly everyone is the more refined podcast management options in iTunes 8. In iTunes 7, you could tell iTunes to check for new podcasts and how often to, tell it what to do when new episodes were available and how many episodes to keep. This was great, but not if you have different podcasts which you want to download/keep at different times. iTunes 8 adds the ability to choose all of the aforementioned settings for each individual podcast. I find this useful when I get lapse at listening to daily podcasts, but when still want to keep the podcast feed, and when I still want my weekly and periodical podcasts to still always download. This new revision of podcast management give you greater control over you content and how you use it. A must for anyone who listens to podcasts!

Visualizer

The incredibly date iTunes visualizer has been given a new breath of life with a new audio visualizer! For those who didn’t know this feature even existed, play a song and hit ctrl+T (command+T for Mac) and see what you were missing. I love and hate this visualizer. I love it because it’s georgous and pretty and fantastic in every way. I hate it because it’s so pretty it distracts me too much and I have to turn it off. This is different from the visualizer that I saw but it is still amazing. While this is nothing to be over the moon about and is by no means a key feature, it’s still nice to have.

While all of these new features are an amazing improvement to what iTunes 7 offered, it all comes at a price. The RAM consumption of iTunes is phenomenal! Currently, iTunes is taking up 317.5MB of my 2GB or RAM. Talk about hulking! I have no idea if this number varies from library to library but it has definetly increased since the introduction of iTunes 8. For me this is no problem, but if you have an older computer, multitasking may become an issue.

 

See why I decided to split all of the new products up?