Crunch Down: iTunes 8

ITunes has come a long way from it’s fledgling self in the early days and now has matured all the way to version 8. The most talked about feature, Genius, is all part of Apple’s new implementations for browsing your music and helping you find lost songs or that old favorite lost in a sea of spanning genres. Depending on your viewing tastes and disk size, HD shows are starting to become a staple of iTunes content. Unfortunately the love-hate relationship is still going between NBC and Apple who’ve brought over a decent catalog of HD shows but what’s not to love about the new iTunes even if the upgrades are minimal, nothing’s really that bad. Unless of course you’re running the Windows version.

While we sympathize with our brethren running that other OS (aptly named for the target destination of where you’d like to chuck your computer when it fails) about Apple’s horrendous coding for Windows and maybe throw a few reminders about buying a Mac accompanied by some snickering, let’s move onto iTunes 8 for the platform it was designed to run on. It’s by no means a speed demon and version 8 isn’t going to dramatically increase launch and load times but the most prominent feature, Genius, isn’t as laggy as you’d think it would be. All of the back end heavy lifting for cataloging and creating a database for musical reference is all done on Apple’s servers. The major downside is lesser known songs not logged by iTunes don’t translate well into making a Genius playlist most notably songs in albums not on the store even though a song of the same name and artist can be bought from Apple. The finer bits are reminiscent of Party Shuffle, already tucked away in iTunes. Whether Apple wants to revive it and prop Genius as yet another way to hassle you to buy music (which wouldn’t be the first time, everyone remembers that Mini Store fiasco) isn’t totally clear but feature wise, it’s pretty cool to use despite its hit or miss nature.

The new tile interface isn’t as ground breaking as Cover Flow incorporated into iTunes but it makes sorting useful and picks up where visually seeing your album left off. If you’ve ever mingled with iPhoto 08’s Events which just love to sort your pictures by whatever option it deems appropriate, it’s a fusion of being able to see what a group consists off, look at its contents quickly and much better categorizing. You can drill down by Albums, Artists, Genres and Composers, simple enough and straight to the point. Should you use the later 3 methods you can gloss over each tile (which can be made bigger or smaller to control how many covers you see on screen at one time) to see what’s under that category’s icon. If you stick with the default view like the most of the rest of us do, you can hover over an album cover to start the first song and end up on the last by time you’re done.

TV shows and movies on the other hand still take on the tile view interface but with a new sorting option; new episodes. If that doesn’t make you giddy about watching Friends over and over again to relive the nostalgia, you can take advantage of your Intel Mac’s power (sorry PowerPC users, not even your beefy quad core Power Mac makes the minimum spec’s list) to watch highly compressed 720P content. To be brutally honest, I couldn’t tell much of a difference between upscaled 480P episodes and 720P encoded episodes. Sure it looks great but not enough for me to want to fork over another dollar.