Focus on iTunes 8

September 10, 2008

Apple have just released version 8 of their iTunes media management software with a host of new features. Grid mode, new visualisation engine and the new genius mode.

Firstly I have to say how much I am loving grid mode. You can opt between artists, genre and album view with the ability to play the full album or double click for selected songs.

The only negative I have found is that is really highlights the missing album art although it does appear as if iTunes is now better at locating album art as I have a number of albums not available on iTunes that when I selected ‘find album art’ it was able to do so.

The new Genius features do look, well genius, that said I am naturally skeptical when people stress that data sent to Apple is anonymous. I guess what is the big deal in Apple knowing what music I listen to and how often but it really did feel quite strange that I had to log into my iTunes account to activate this anonymous feature.

When you turn on iTunes 8’s new Genius feature, information about your music library is again, anonymously sent to the iTunes Store, where it is combined with the anonymously-gathered knowledge from millions of other iTunes users and processed through Apple-developed algorithms.

The Genius results, specifically tailored to your personal music library, are sent back to your computer to enable users to automatically create Genius playlists in iTunes and on your iPods, even when they are not connected to the Internet.

One of the Genius features displays ‘recommendations’ from the store I guess like the mini store and most users ended up turning off. You can hide these easily enough from view though.

The play lists do seem to work well, and I am no genius but it looks as it selects songs of the same tempo, volume, and perhaps style other than that there is no obvious connection. The thing is though, it works I have tried 4-5 different playlists and I am hearing songs from my 32GB of music I had completely forgotten about. Hopefully as more users start using the system it will get even better. This feature should avoid the random Metallica song appearing in a playlist when you have visitors round and you employ iTunes for the casual, relaxed background music. Metallica are great but definitely not background music for the middle aged.

I think there is only one word to describe the new visualisation system and that is stunning, here is hoping it makes its way onto the Apple TV in the near future.

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