iTunes 7 - September 17th, 2006
With the announcement of movies available for purchase from the iTunes Music Store, and the release of some new iPods comes a new version of Apple’s Music Player, iTunes. It sports a new menu design which seems a bit more organised and looks quite nice, it also seems to be user-testing a few different UI changes that i’m assuming will be part of the new version of the Mac OS when it launches next year. It all looks very grey, so my guess is that after OS X had that bubbly translucent colourful look when it launched, with the imminent release of Windows Vista, Apple might be going in a different design direction in a attempt to immediattely date the look of the overdue upgrade to Windows. Funny.
Anyway, one good thing and one bad thing about the new iTunes…
Good.
The new iTunes now supports downloading multiple tracks at once from an purchases through the iTunes Music Store (ITMS). It looks like it downloads 3 at a time while the rest sit in a queue. I thought that was interesting as i hadn’t seen it documented anywhere else before.
Bad.
The ‘interactive booklets’ that you sometimes get with albums purchased through the ITMS now don’t work. I only noticed this when trying to look at the one that came with the most recent The Mars Volta album and it only playing a 5 seccond track of silence instead of opening any sort of interactive booklet. Thinking that it was proably just a dud with that particular release i didn’t care too much, although after a little bit more investigating, it seems that the booklet that came with Audioslave‘s Revelations, that had previously worked fine, now does the ol’ 5 second shuffle. I’m assuming it’s more to do with the new version of Quicktime though rather than iTunes itself, as those booklets just seem to be quicktime movies with an interactive flash layer for theirr so-called ‘interaction’.