Apple made some significant improvements to their Music lineup on September 12 with the release of iTunes 7, New iPod’s and a new gadget code named iTV. iTunes received a nicely designed upgrade to the interface and features different viewing modes that allows you to “rediscover” your music. All of the iPods received some kind of update including the shuffle. iTV seemed like a cool tool to get multimedia content from our computers to the living room but depending on it’s price point, it may be cheaper to just get a Mac mini and reap the full benefit of a computer on our large LCD TV screens.
No doubt that Apple is attempting to stay on top of the music industry and keep an iPod in every pocket full of songs and video from the iTunes store, Jobs announced that iTunes would start selling full length movies from the iTunes store at prices from $9.99, $12.99, and $14.99. As more and more cell phones are designed to be a media player as much as a phone, Jobs is hoping that by adding movies to the lineup, will give everyone a reason to keep an iPod.
iTunes now features a nice layout called “Cover Flow” which allows you to view your music/movies by flipping through the album art. Even if you didn’t buy the music in your iTunes library from the iTunes store, Apple will let you download the album art for the appropriate album automatically. From my experience all you need to have is a matching Album name to get the Artwork to download.
iTunes also allows for gapless playback. This only comes into play when you are listening to an album that was designed to be played continuously. I have a few Pink Floyd albums that were intended to be played like this as several of the songs continuously transition from one to another.
The music store now features all video content at higher resolutions (640X480) which is an upgrade from the previous content but still shy of the nicer looking 720p I was hoping for.
Aside from the iTunes update, the iPod received great new searching features as well as games. Since I’m not as “into” the iPod revolution as some, I was hoping for MacBook updates but I guess I’ll have to keep waiting.
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