iTunes 7

Apple released a new version of iTunes on Tuesday, Sept 12th to coincide with the introduction of their new movie downloads service.

The download service features only 75 Disney and Pixar films at inception, but more are planned. Further, the price is about what you'd pay brand new on a shelf - 12.99.

Supposedly, the big evil corporation made huge blatant hints about never ever again carrying any of those movies for any movie studio that would sell movies via iTunes at the price Steve Jobs wanted - 4.99 to 9.99.

I'm sure we can all guess who that was.

Anyway, onto the software.

The brushed steel is completely gone, even from the buttons of the interface.

The panel on the left is more segregated now with sections for library files, store options, and seperate playlists.

A button below that panel enables you to show the album artwork (which if I recall has been present since version 4, however this time...)

iTunes now has the ability to auto-search the Apple database for album cover art (if applicable.)

The top right has a few buttons to allow different grouping of the files in the active playlist, including by cover art.

The equalizer button is gone; now you need to go to the View menu to access it.


It's a bit more robust of a version over 6.0 and 6.1, however, there are some glaring problems with the album art autosearch. Apple's database is pretty strictly named. If you've created a large library of files from your personal music collection, there's a good chance that the album names are not exactly the same as those in Apple's information, and you won't receive the album artwork when you select it to download.

Some glaring examples:
Transfomers: The Movie (soundtrack) automatically generates an album heading of 'Transfoemers The Movie (sundtrack)'. This obviously won't get searched by Apple's database.
The soundtrack for Cars automatically generates an album heading of 'Cars Soundtrack.' Changing it to just Cars doesn't garner an album art download, either.

So out of 400 files - roughly 15 assorted soundtracks and ~100 misc files - I have ten different cover art.

Anyway, it's a good upgrade. I just won't be buying movies through it.