Apple announces iTunes 7

I bought the new 80 GB iPod and attempted to place 34.3 Gb of music onto it. After 20 hours, it was finally done. I eagerly ejected it so that I could try it out when, "Oh my God!" there's no music on it. Reconnected to investigate and iTunes says it doesn't recognize the iPod and I should go the summary page and restore it. Oops, You can't choose restore if iTunes can't see it. Placed it on my PC and was able to do a restore. Put it back on the Mac and restore again. Choose auto sync and let it run for a short time, close the Mac cover and look at the iPod and "Good!" there's music on it. Let it run for a few hours and "Nuts" no music again. back to a double restore only this time I'll sync it an album at a time by using the check box. No, can't do that, all 8095 songs are checked and you can't do a deselect all. Imagine how long it will take to deselect all those songs, one at a time. iTunes suck! Anybody have a good 3rd party app that works?

One problem I haven't been able to solve is this. I've stored all of my ripped DVDs in my media drive the same way as my MP3s--Artist's Folder/Album/Tracks. Now it seems to move place all video files into a folder called "Movies" and are stored loose. There is no organization of DVD Artist and subtitles. This is a MAJOR drawback. I haven't been able to find the option to modify it.

Another irk. Before, iTunes 6.x allowed you to convert a file to iPod format at a smaller 320p size. Now, it only allows you to do so at 640p. What's funny is that I have "master" formats of my DVDs in natural 720p (usually) format. The iPod converted 640p version is LARGER in data size. They should provide a way to set your video conversion settings like they do audio import settings.

Bummer.

Other than those two things, it is a thing of beauty. But until those are resolved, I'm sticking with 6... Unless one of you bright minds know how to solve the first problem (which is my major one).

Thanks!

Got it updared all my computers within the hour of its release. It even runs under Windows Vista (which is running on my 17" MBP via Boot Camp 1.1), with minimul fuss (just having to manually kill explorer.exe and restart it manually)

A side note: 5G iPods can now play 640x480 H.264 video, whereas they were limited to 480x480 before today. This is after iTunes and iPod firmware updates.

Has anyone figured out external libraries?

Simply and succinctly AWESOME!!!

I'm not 100% sure about this, but I think Itunes 7 will only get album art for discs that have been purchased through a store. If you get songs via free download, or through sites like allofmp3.com or emusic.com, or have ripped them from a CD-R, the artwork doesn't show up, even if the album is in the Itunes store.

To #46. Has anyone figured out how to connect an external library to iTunes 7 as per this: http://www.apple.com/itunes/jukebox/sourcelist.html ???

I've got some tracks showing up as audio books that aren't - they're just music tracks, but I can't see how to get iTunes to put them in the right list...
How strange... gonna have to zip over to the Apple forums but anyone else getting odd things happening? (It's also saying they're 'protected AAC' files but they're not (protected that is)

Thanks for the 'browse' tip - so it's 'hidden in plain sight' sort of thing.
Shame they can't get a mid-way between browse and the other views.