Time for some oblig­a­tory mouthing off about Apple’s lat­est iFi­esta:

• iPod with Video (such an ungainly name): enhanced with more stor­age and brighter screen.
• iPod Nano: totally redesigned. Or rather, it’s just like the retired iPod mini except more mini. Comes in a very con­fus­ing array of mod­els, with cer­tain col­ors only avail­able with cer­tain stor­age sizes. No doubt black iPods are pop­u­lar, for that fin­ish is reserved for the top-priced model.
• iPod Shuf­fle: totally redesigned. Really small. Really, really small. No, I mean, like, accidentally-inhale-small.
• iTV: pre­viewed months ahead of planned release, usual for Apple to say the least. I already use Air­port Express to wire­lessly stream music from my com­puter to my stereo, a mas­sive improve­ment oo my computer’s speak­ers (which don’t suck). So being able to stream video to a real TV will no doubt be really cool. $299 doesn’t seem like so much when an iPod costs about the same.
• The iTunes Music Store is now sim­ply (and belat­edly) just iTunes Store. Fea­ture films and iPod Games join the exist­ing lineup of music, audio­books, pod­casts, TV shows and music videos. Buy­ing sin­gle TV shows and music videos makes sense to me (thanks to iTunes, I didn’t miss a sin­gle Lost episode last sea­son), but at this point I can’t imag­ine ever buy­ing a movie as a dig­i­tal down­load. It’s a rare movie I see twice, and those that I wish to, I’ll buy the DVD (or just rent it twice through Net­flix) for higher-quality pic­ture and sur­round sound, not to men­tion bonus mate­r­ial. And dig­i­tal down­load prices of $9.99 to $14.99 are absurd; I recently pur­chased the new 2-disc spe­cial edi­tion of Apoc­a­lypse Now! from Ama­zon for about $13.
• iTunes 7, the first new release in years to include actual new fea­tures to enhance lis­ten­ing to and orga­niz­ing music. Pre­vi­ously releases were almost entirely commerce-related (adding music video and TV con­tent to the iTunes Store), and Apple has appar­ently been sav­ing up a huge flood of new fea­tures, some sig­nif­i­cant, oth­ers troublesome:
  • Tog­gle between view options: 1. the famil­iar stan­dard list, 2. grouped by album (with art­work), and 3. Cover Flow. Pur­chased out­right from Steel Skies, Cover Flow is a visu­ally strik­ing new inter­face that aims to evoke the real-world brows­ing of albums by their cov­ers. It appar­ently caches the album cover image files on your hard drive the first time you use it, so if it seems slow at first it should improve. It’s neat; already I think I will con­tinue to use the bor­ing list view when I know specif­i­cally what I’m look­ing for, but Cover Flow is a way to skim through and redis­cover dusty old tracks I may have fogot­ten about.
  • Gap­less play­back. I haven’t tried this fea­ture yet myself, but it always was annoy­ing to hear a split-second pause between tracks on a live album, so this is wel­come. To take advan­tage of it, how­ever, iTunes must res­can your entire library, which can take for­ever if you have as huge a col­lec­tion as me. Then you need to man­u­ally tag spe­cific tracks as part of “gap­less albums.” I’m not sure what hap­pens then when you lis­ten to stuff on shuf­fle… when hap­pens when a “gap­less” track is ran­domly cued up to a gappy one?
  • Trans­fer from iPod, mean­ing that for the first time, you can legally copy music from your iPod to another com­puter. How­ever, it is lim­ited to files pur­chased from the iTunes Store, and the des­ti­na­tion com­puter must also be autho­rized (the first time you play a pur­chased file on any com­puter, you have to log in with your iTunes account info, which reg­is­ters your com­puter over the inter­net to Apple). Apple obvi­ously couldn’t/wouldn’t allow total sync­ing before because of piracy fears, but since it’s lim­ited to DRM-controlled music, then every­thing should be kosher with the music rights-holders (99% of the time, not the musi­cians, but that’s another story).
  • Auto­matic album cover down­loads. Lots of ques­tion shere. How accu­rate is it? I’d rather have no art than the wrong cover. You can request art for spe­cific albums or have it go through your entire library at once (it also searches for art when you rip a cd). I tried it on my work com­puter with a rel­a­tively small libary of about 600 songs. The results were mixed: it cor­rectly grabbed Talk­ing Heads’ 77 (albeit of hor­ren­dously poor JPG qual­ity), but couldn’t find such a pop­u­lar and dis­tinc­tively named album as Goril­laz’ Demon Days. I only noticed one error: iTunes mis­took Suzanne Vega’s Ses­sions at West 54^th EP for the com­pi­la­tion The Best of Ses­sions at West 54^th.
  • A trou­ble­some new meta tag: Album Artist. As I under­stand it, this is for the rare instance in which a sin­gle artist’s album fea­tures a few tracks by dif­fer­ent artists, but is not a com­pi­la­tion. So, Jane Doe’s album may be by “Jane Doe” over­all, but have one track by “Jane Doe feat. John Doe.” Now you can use the tag “Artist” for indi­vid­ual tracks and “Album Artist” to group together an entire album under a sin­gle name. OK fine, but much much more com­mon (at least in my col­lec­tion) are com­pi­la­tions of var­i­ous artists. There’s already a tag to flag cer­tain albums as com­pi­la­tions, but now iTunes 7 groups them by artist if you don’t man­u­ally spec­ify some­thing like “Var­i­ous Artists” in the Album Artist tag. If you have only one track from a com­pi­la­tion, iTunes thinks it’s an album by that artist, even if it’s tagged as a com­pi­la­tion! So the end result is a lot of busy work for me so iTunes can go back to rec­og­niz­ing com­pi­la­tions. For some­one as anal reten­tive as I with a metic­u­lously man­aged music library, this is annoy­ing to say the least!
  • More meta­data: skipped count and date. Now you can track how often you choose not to lis­ten to something.
  • And now for more com­plaints: when you pur­chase any­thing or a pod­cast updates itself, it appears in a “Down­loads” sort-of playlist, instead of at the top. So now you need to man­u­ally click over to that playlist to see what’s going on.
  • Var­i­ous inter­face changes, includ­ing non-glossy but­tons and… heinous scroll­bars! WTF? Icky grey-blue blobs that look like noth­ing else on a Mac any­where! I’m not sure, but if these same scroll­bars appear on the Win­dows ver­sion, then per­haps Apple wanted to make the user expe­ri­ence more uni­form, and so they can adver­tise with images of iTunes that any­body will rec­og­nize as theirs. Dsandler.org has a great overview of the graph­i­cal user inter­face design night­mare and links to many oth­ers (spot­ted on Dar­ing Fire­ball).
  • iTunes (and iPods) still can’t alpha­bet­ize prop­erly. I am totally stri­dent on this point, so thus begins my rant: alpha­bet­iz­ing song, artist, and album names should have been in iTunes 1.0, and it’s insane that six revi­sions later it still can’t han­dle it. Artists begin­ning with “The” are alphe­be­t­ized cor­rectly, but songs and albums aren’t. So, The Bea­t­les cor­rectly appear under “B”, but “The Long and Wind­ing Road” shows up under “T” and where’s John Lennon? That’s right, filed under “J” of course! Any brick & mor­tar music store orga­nized like this would go out of busi­ness before you can run through your ABCs. If Apple will intro­duce a whole com­plex new sys­tem to han­dle rel­a­tively rare cases where you need an Album Artist, why won’t they address some­thing as utterly basic as this? I pre­dict that in the future there will be even more musi­cians who go by one name, if for no rea­son other than peo­ple being able to find their music on their iPod. OK, rant over.

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