iTunes 8 was launched during Apple’s special music event yesterday. I was very excited to try it out and downloaded it the first thing this morning. Here are my initial Impressions and review of the new features in iTunes 8.
The biggest feature touted at the keynote is Genius Playlists. The idea is that iTunes will automatically generate playlists, based on the current song, with other songs that ‘go well together’. iTunes will initially index all your music and send it back to Apple’s servers where a database based on your playlists, play counts, likes, and dislikes will be built. It then matches this with other users’ databases and brings back all that genius information, updating it from time to time. You need to have an iTunes Store account to use the Genius features (one more reason to have an iTS account). All this is well and good in theory, but how does it perform in the real world?
Genius Playlists
This one is really a genius—after all your songs are indexed, you can create Genius Playlists for any song you select. This works pretty well. To hear other songs that go well with a particular track, you just select it and hit the Genius button. It creates a new playlist of songs that are similar. I selected ‘Pappu Can’t Dance’ and my playlist was populated with ‘Dil Na Diya’, ‘Ab To Forever’, ‘My Dil Goes Mmm…’, ‘Show Me Your Jalwa’, ‘Jhoom Barabar Jhoom’, ‘Fanaa’, etc.. I guess these songs are kinda similar and this is great way to listen to songs that suit your current mood. You can get playlists of 25, 50, 75, or 100 songs and save them if you wish. After my iTunes 8 test drive, I ended up by rating more songs and discovering ones that lay ignored in my library, courtesy of Genius Playlists.
Genius Sidebar
Genius Sidebar is simply speaking the Mini Store displayed as a sidebar instead of the bottom. Automatically updated with the online store, it displays a list of ‘Songs I’m missing’ and ‘Recommendations’ from the iTunes Store. You select a song and after a few seconds, the sidebar is populated with songs that you can then preview or buy instantly.
There are a few caveats though—it sometimes shows songs that are already in my library, comes up with completely random stuff on other occasions, especially when with regard to hindi music (why I would want to buy some Craig Armstrong song when I’m listening to ‘Humko Maloom Hai’ is beyond me), or just defaults to showing the best selling stuff on the iTunes Store. The sidebar also shows music only on the currently selected track and not the Now Playing track. While this behaviour is understandable, it might confuse users as to why they are getting weird recommendations.
This needs more time to work because it’ll improve as Apple gets more and more user databases. And if you find that the Genius Sidebar creates a lot of clutter, which it does if you have a low resolution, you can easily turn it off by hitting the Show/Hide sidebar button at the bottom right.
Grid View
The Grid view is the major UI change in iTunes 8. Unlike the album view (which has been given the boot), Grid view lays out your album covers against a dark background. Across the top run four tabs—Albums, Artists, Genres, and Composers—and a slider for adjusting the size of the grid artwork.
The Album view is the simplest one, with everything laid out for you to browse through. Hovering over the thumbnails brings up the ‘Play Album’ button. Double clicking it lets you view all the songs within that album. The Artist view clubs all albums from an artist and puts them into thumbnails, much like iPhoto does with its Events view. Move your mouse from left to right to see the various albums inside that grid unit. The Genre view puts default artwork for known genres like ‘Rock’ and ‘Electronic’, but fills in the rest of the genres with covers from the albums it contains. Again, the skimming through albums applies here as well. The Composer view is good for classical music but if there’s not much of that it is a pretty useless option.
The Grid View also applies to Movies, Audiobooks, Podcasts, and TV shows. And when it comes to Podcasts and TV shows, it displays a badge count of how many unwatched episodes remain in that particular show. One can also view only new episodes in TV shows and Podcasts.
A handy tip is to enable the “Group Albums” setting. This will group your grid thumbnails alphabetically like albums on the iPhone. And the quickest way to find any artist is to hit the initial letter which will take you right to the group corresponding to it.
All said and done, I’m still a big fan of the Cover Flow View, and might not use this one at all. [Ed note: However, both Milind and I disagree. The Grid View is pretty neat and I, for one, have it set as the default whenever I’m not running the sexy new visualizer.] Even though it might look cooler than the other views, it’s not the most functional as it requires additional clicks to play a particular track and doesn’t look nice for songs without album art (and shame on you for having songs without album art in the first place).
A Brand New Visualizer
I like the look and feel of this new visualizer. It looks like the solar system is having a party of its own. There are revolving planets, flashing stars, and swirly threads sweeping over it all. It looks stunning in full screen mode. When I played ‘Karma Chameleon’ and switched off the lights, my room looked like one of those discotheques. The visualizer performs well even on low end Windows systems, which is surprising considering the amount of jazz it presents. [Ed note: It’s surprising that Windows runs on low end systems (or runs at all) in the first place!]
HD TV Shows
Don’t the Lost Island and Claire Bennet saving the world in Heroes look awesome when watched in high definition? You can now buy an episode of any TV Show of your choice in HD for $3 from the iTunes Store. NBC has also made a comeback and you now have a lot more choice. There are some free HD TV Show episodes available [iTunes link] right now, most of which are season premiers, of Heroes, Lipstick Jungle, 30 Rock, and others. SD versions stay at $2 per episode.
An interesting aspect of this is that if you buy the HD version, the SD version is also downloaded along with it, so you can directly sync that with your iPhone or iPod. [Ed note: However, if you stop watching the HD version at a certain point on your Mac and intend to continue it on your iPhone or iPod later, it won’t resume from the point you stopped at.] All this is, of course, done behind the scenes. Quicktime 7.5.5 is required for the playback of HD TV Shows.
Changes abound
iTunes has brought in some much appreciated changes to managing media. For one, the ‘Multiple Item Information’ dialog box has gone through some changes, with the addition of some options earlier available only for single items. For instance, it is now possible to mark multiple video files as TV Shows at once instead of going through each and every one individually or having to use something like MetaX. And you can finally add/edit the description tag for videos and podcasts.
We also have individual settings for podcasts. Suppose you want your regular news podcast to automatically delete old podcasts while downloading new ones, but want to keep all episodes of the Apple Keynotes podcast. With the new controls you can have individual settings for each podcast in addition to the default one.
It appears that the iTunes preferences dialog took a trip to the obesity centre. Podcast settings are nowhere to be seen and now reside only in the Podcasts section in the library. Buttons across the top have also been rearranged, with the Advanced tab taking the last place. A lot of preferences have been axed to give it a simpler look. In the General tab, options like “Show links to the iTunes Store”, “Remember view setting”, etc. are all gone. What we have instead are some accessibility options like making the text larger. The Playback tab also gets a trimming with the Smart Shuffle setting being done away with completely because they’ve now been replaced by Genius Playlists. The Advanced tab loses a lot of clutter and now features a single tab instead of the three sub-tabs.
The Media browser and Eject buttons are replaced with the Genius Playlist and the Show/Hide Genius sidebar buttons. The Media browser, however, is still accessible from the menu bar.
Surprisingly, the Print dialog has been updated with a lot of additional options for printing your music. This comes as quite a surprise considering people hardly use that feature (or do they?).
Other changes include better accessibility for people using assistive technologies like VoiceOver and screen reading software. Also, QuickTime and Front Row updates are out for iTunes 8 compatibility.
In Conclusion
On the whole, iTunes 8 gets Genius, a new browsing mode, a cooler visualizer, and other changes that you don’t want to miss out. Genius Playlist & the new Visualizer make it an exciting update but HD TV Shows & Genius Sidebar are useless for most Indian users as we don’t have an iTunes Store yet. If you’re an iTunes user though (and how can you not be if you use a Mac), you won’t be disappointed. It certainly is my favourite one yet. Let us know what you think of it in the comments.
[Several portions of this review have been contributed by Milind Alvares.]
