Filed under: iTunes, Software Update
iTunes 7.1 first impressions
So I just finished rebooting the computer after loading the new iTunes and QuickTime updates and here's what I found. After launching iTunes and going through the mandatory "click accept" thing (I mean, honestly, does anyone ever read those things? I don't.), I waited for a couple of minutes while iTunes "updated" my library. I've got a very small library compared to most people, so I'm a little wary about how long this might take for other people.
The new full-screen Cover Flow (shown here) is nice and easy to use. Click the button at the bottom right of the screen to zoom in and out from full-screen mode.
When you control-click (or right-click) items in your library, there's a new "Apply Sort Field" option, where you can pick Same Album, Same Artist, Same Album Artist, Same Composer or Same Show. Select any of these and iTunes will prompt you whether to change the Sort field for all matching tracks. (e.g. If you select Same Album, you affect the Sort Album column, and so forth.) I'm still unclear as to the utility of this new option. Let me know in the comments why this is important.
Finally, there's a new AppleTV help option in the Help menu, but the links are still pretty much all bogus. This will probably change as AppleTV actually ships.
Check out all the screenshots in our gallery.
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Reader Comments (Page 1 of 4)
John Hood said 6:13PM on 3-05-2007
Don't forget to repair permissions after restarting!
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JayK said 6:11PM on 3-05-2007
How's that Dixie Chicks album, stud?
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5cents said 6:14PM on 3-05-2007
What's the point of fullscreen cover flow? I see it as competing with Front Row's interface now (in both cases, you can only play music and other apps/desktop/menubar are hidden).
I had thought they were upgrading to an iPhone like interface where if you click the cover art, it flips over and displays the songs. This way they could get rid of the two seperate windows for track info/ratings/genre and cover art (when in coverflow mode).
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BillyOk said 6:14PM on 3-05-2007
So... more bloat then. Yay!
I dumped iTunes 7 last week, went back to 6. I appreciate it in a whole new light: Smaller imprint, less ugly, no gapless playback garbage messing up parts of my library and slowing me down. I'll hang onto this one as long as I can, because I'm sure iTunes 8 will make iTunes 7 look good my comparison.
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dave said 6:19PM on 3-05-2007
I thought I was the only one w/Dora in iTunes.
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contact said 6:24PM on 3-05-2007
The sort thing is quite handy. I have my CD collection alphabetically since I have so many albums, so know I can organise my iTunes in the same way. Thus, I can have Ben Folds under F, John Mayer under M etc. Very handy.
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tim said 6:28PM on 3-05-2007
is anyone else running hot now? im running at ~140 while doing nothing but playing music with itunes hidden and firefox open. im on a 1.5ghz pb-g4
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jhunter.inbox said 6:35PM on 3-05-2007
hey i agree that coverflow should probably get integrated into frontrow as it doesn't make a lot of sense having the two separate! maybe for 7.2...
also i have a library of 2097 songs (not huge, i know!) but the 'updating music library' bar on my mbp 2.16 / 1gb took about a second, i hardly had time to read what it was saying!
i don't know about bloat...it feels faster if anything...
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Adam Maras said 6:59PM on 3-05-2007
All of a sudden (this is on my PC) my keyboard media keys work without the installation of Multi-Plugin by Localhost!
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David said 7:07PM on 3-05-2007
Would be great if the full screen cover flow was able to be navigated with the Apple Remote or if they integrated this with Front Row
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Jon said 7:16PM on 3-05-2007
Maybe Apple TV was delayed because of a delay in the iTunes update?
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Lloyd said 11:15AM on 3-06-2007
Nothing ground-breaking but full screen coverflow does look gorgeous (if it's a little sluggish for me).
By contrast, standard CoverFlow is not MUCH snappier than it was before the update - I mean it's but'er smooth now - before it could be ever so slightly jumpy (I have a large library + adicted to high-res AA).
Generally happy, want to see Apple TV :)
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Paul said 7:11PM on 3-05-2007
The new sort options let you define how a song/album/artist is sorted. iTunes has always disregarded "The" if it was at the beginning of a name ("The Beatles" would be sorted under "B").
Now you can define these things yourself. I just changed the sorting options for some of my songs. " "Weird Al" Yankovic " would show up at the top of my library when I sorted by artist because of the quotation marks, but when I put just " Weird Al Yankovic " in the Sort Artist field, the songs were sorted with the rest of the W's.
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Bruno said 7:15PM on 3-05-2007
Good: There are sort items for Album and Artist name (the two most important) that can be applied per track.
Bad: You can only apply this to one track at a time.
If you "Get Info" to edit multiple tracks you don't see any of the sort fields unfortunately. This is going to make it a BIG pain to set a sort field for 10000 Maniacs as 'Ten Thousand Maniacs" or the previously mentioned "John Mayer" sorting as "Mayer, John"
Sort tags have been supported in the MP3 tag structure for some time, so hopefully Apple is using these appropriate tag frames. TSOP (performer sort tag), TSOA (album title sort tag), etc..
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Moose said 7:18PM on 3-05-2007
How's that gender role stereotyping, JayK?
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Guy said 7:29PM on 3-05-2007
I just installed the wwan update along with the iTunes and Quicktime updates and it rendered my system unbootable.
The update application began a restart after it finished downloading those updates and when the mac finished the restart all I saw was my desktop wallpaper and the spotlight icon on the far upper right corner.
I waited for over 15 minutes and nothing happend. (I'm writing this from the Windows installation on my mac, talk about a bad user experience).
I'm wondering might have gone wrong during that update,
Also, one really wonders why an iTunes and Quicktime update requires a restart in the first place.
Help, anyone?
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ODog said 7:34PM on 3-05-2007
When you select a song in the drop down menu the option for find artwork is gone
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Somebody said 7:51PM on 3-05-2007
If you want to apply the custom sort to many tracks at once, then edit one track's sorting options. Then right-click on it, and select Apply Sort Field/Same (thing you just edited).
For example, if you want to sort David Bowie's music by his last name, then pick one track and change its Sort Artist to Bowie, David. Then right-click on the track and hit Apply Sort Field/Same Artist to apply the change to all the other Bowie tracks.
Yes, it's convoluted. You'd think Apple of all companies would document it better.
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David said 8:01PM on 3-05-2007
"Also, one really wonders why an iTunes and Quicktime update requires a restart in the first place."
Yeah, that was weird. but it only did it with my Mac. My Windows system didn't need to be restarted after updating.
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Mgkwho said 8:08PM on 3-05-2007
for me the itunes library update took less than 2 seconds...i have a 17mbp tho so maybe that's why?
like budda.
-=|Mgkwho
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