A Look At iTunes 7

11/01/2007

Itunes has been around for years. With its latest incarnation, it can supposedly do more than you could ever want with a media player. Let's see how iTunes stands as I review it.

Getting Started

Installation of iTunes went without a hitch and was really easy. However, the installer for iTunes is appallingly large, coming in at a whopping 49MB. This is huge considering that Windows Media Player 11, which does pretty much everything iTunes does is only half that size and there are many popular media players out there that do everything iTunes does and more at even smaller sizes. Also know that if you are installing iTunes, you are getting Quicktime in the bundle. There is no way to download it without Quicktime as they use it as the engine to play videos.

By default, iTunes started searching my computer for any music files that I may have. This is different from previous version where it brought me up to a blank playlist and I had to go manually select the folder and wait an hour for iTunes to process 48GB of music. This time however, it processed everything automatically and the whole thing only took 10 minutes, which impressed me over their previous versions. It also brought up the irritating iTunes Mini Store. I would highly recommend unless you use, the store at all, to just go into the preferences and completely disable it. I think iTunes looks better without it.

Playing The Media

The music aspect of iTunes is very simple to use. Upon inserting a CD, it will ask you if you want to import the disc, and if you have an active internet connection it will even download all the information for the CD for you, including track names, album names, artists, and release dates among other things. Remember, when you import the songs, it will import in AAC format by default. If you want this to be usable by more media players than iTunes, I suggest changing the settings to import into MP3 format.

Playing the music is as easy as double clicking the song, and the search feature on iTunes is one of the best I've come across. Because it works on an index, you can simply type in the song, artist, or album into the search and it will bring up the name of the song as you type making for the quickest of any of the media players I've used for finding my song.

Want to create a new playlist? This is simple too. Simply press the + button below the playlist and album art panes, type in a playlist name, and drag the songs over. If you are dragging a big group of songs over, iTunes will even tell you how many songs your are putting on the playlist. Because of the search function on iTunes, you don't have to create a playlist for each of your CDs just to listen to only that particular album, it's far easier to just type in the album name on the search. You can even burn CD's from these playlists, making this one of the easiest tools for creating new cds. Itunes takes the liberty of providing a few playlists from the get go, and these are populated as you add songs to your library.

Unfortunately, unlike some of the other popular music players, iTunes lacks the ability to automatically bring in the album art when you import a cd. Because this you have to expand out the album art pane just to view the album art for those that may already have it. Fortunately, if you don't mind doing a little legwork, Album Art is very easy to add.

The Radio Stations were very easy to access. Itunes provides a several hundred different radio stations for free that you can listen to of all sorts of genres. I did notice that it would go through periods where it would rebuffer the songs a lot, but if you could put up with that, this worked pretty well. Movies however, were a whole different headache. Trying to get videos to play was a nightmare. I managed to get .mpg and .mov files to play, and once I got them to play, only the really low bitrate ones played even sort of nicely. All the rest of them skipped wildly. As a movie player, iTunes is a complete failure.

The Interface

The iTunes interface is fairly simple. By default everything displays in List View, similar to what you would find in Windows explorer. However, this is only one of the three views. There is also a Group with Artwork View, and the Coverflow View. The list view allows you to view the most songs at one time. If you are big into looking at Album Art, Group with Artwork View might be a good choice. The downside to this being that you will be limited on the amount of songs you can have on your screen at once by the album art, which will take up space regardless of whether you have art or not, thus making you have to scroll down to view the rest of your songs.

The Coverflow view is a combination of List View and an aesthetically pleasing Album Art view. It shows the grid with the song list, with a large picture of the album art above it. You can also see previews of the album art for the previous and next 4 albums on the playlist. However, I noticed that this sometimes takes a little bit of time to change, but it looks nice when it does. You can even bring this Coverflow view into a fullscreen mode. While this removes the list from view, if your objective is to view the Album Art, this might be useful.

Other Things of Note

Of course the main reason why people install iTunes is because they have an iPod. If iTunes and the iPod were made for each other, I don't see why Apple doesn't support the thing better. It takes forever for iTunes to acknowledge that my iPod exists, sometimes up to 3 minutes, and once it does, it doesn't always want to let it go. This is stupid because Windows recognizes it within seconds of my attaching it to the computer. Maybe Apple has lost a little bit of focus about why people are using this program. Also the program is painfully slow to open in the first place and even after I get it to recognize that I have an iPod attached, it takes a really long time to actually let me view the contents of the iPod.

The Visualization tool on iTunes is mediocre at best. In regular mode, where it just takes up the iTunes window, it functions great until you actually try to do something such as open a menu, or do anything at all in Windows. Otherwise it lags and skips, and just generally looks bad. Fortunately, they have finally fixed the full screen mode so that it doesn't do the same thing all the time. In previous versions, just putting it in full screen mode would make it jolt about and lag. Now it only does this for about 5 seconds when it switches songs. Also, there is only one Visualizer available, so if you don't like it, you are pretty much stuck with it, unless you know how to add another one (such as whitecap).

The Equalizer does a noticeable job at making the sound better depending on the genre you are listening to, but you have to manually change this. The difference is noticeable but not great. If they wanted to make this tool really useful, they would have it change depending on the songs playing on iTunes. This would theoretically be pretty easy to do because songs imported from CD generally have the genre information included already.

There is a mini-player mode that you can put it in, which displays the basic information for what is playing, the track time, and the basics of a media player. This still takes up a goodly portion of space, so a good alternative to this is the taskbar player. Although it's not enabled by default, with the task bar player, you can minimize itunes to the taskbar and skip songs, pause the music, and adjust the volume. Alternately you can configure itunes to just minimize to the system tray.

There is also a browser for the List View. This adds the Genre, Artist, and Album panes to the List View to make it easier for people to sort through the music and get exactly what they want. This is very similar to the interface that you would find on the iPod. However, this isn't turned on be default, so most iPod users will never benefit from it.

Itunes now comes with its very own software updater. This program checks to see if you need to do updates on either Safari or iTunes. Fortunately, it only seems to come up when iTunes is actually running.

Final Thoughts

iTunes while nice, has gotten very bloated and a could do with a waistline reduction. While it has a lot of cool features, the only reason I really see to use it besides iPod support, is because I really like the searching. I've been using iTunes for a few years now and the quality of the program has gone down while the size has gone up.

While this release isn't as buggy as some of the past ones, having to download an increasingly file about once every 2-3 weeks is very tiresome. Since I started using this, I've seen iTunes increase in size from 20MB to 49MB. Granted when they added movie support, this increased the size up to 30MB, but with their latest releases, there isn't really anything new being added and the size just keeps increasing, which leads to the conclusion of sloppy and bloated coding. Come on Apple, that's a hallmark of Microsoft products, not Apple.

While I am impressed with some aspects of this program, the increasing size and slowness of this program is less than impressive. The only part of this program that really keeps me with it is the search function, but all it would take is someone to put search functionality like that and iPod support on a comparable media player (and there are tons of them out there) and I would pack up and leave the iTunes camp forever. Let's hope someone does, because this program is getting ridicules.

Rating: 3/5


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