Tuesday, September 9, 2008

iTunes 8: It's 1 better than 7!

I managed to stay awake through was I would argue was the dullest, most unexciting keynote speech ever given by Steve Jobs.  I almost thought I was watching Bill Gates, but then I realized Bill doesn't wear that stupid Mission Impossible outfit (black turtle neck with long sleeves).  I saw the effort he put into making iTunes 8 look exciting but the most I could get from it was that it was marginally "better" than 7.x.

So, with that, I went ahead and updated my iTunes to 8.0 on my Vista desktop.  So far it's not bad.  It dumped all of the album cover art however, so that kind of sucks.  Amazing that it couldn't manage to retain that.  All of the upgrades from 7.0 to the most recent 7.x never did that.  However, those upgrades were consistent in one respect (on my computer anyway):  They corrupted my iTunes library on every *other* version update.

HD TV content, a few new movies, a few more TV shows (resulting from their kiss-and-makeup with NBC), the new thumbnail view feature, and the new "Genius" feature that grabs all of your library data and uploads it into their "safe cloud" to analyze and suggest relevant playlists for you, through the magic of server-side calculations.  I will have to give that a try and see how it works.  I will be curious to see what it thinks is related best to Frank Zappa.  Should be interesting.

No comments: