I finally had the time to upgrade iTunes to version 7, I must say that the improvements in this build are pretty impressive.

The Good

Tasks View

What I particularly like is how they separated the “current performing tasks” into it’s own page rather than having to click and cycle through the main display. This can get very irritating if you’re downloading a lot of podcasts, then are listening to something. Say you want to change the playhead position on that song – you’ll have to cycling though the different tasks until you see the “task” for the current playing song.

Apple has solved that by putting it on a separate page view:

Device View

‘Nuff said. Beautifully executed… and not to mention very useful.

Album View

You also have a new way of viewing your albums:

If you want a more Apple-esque implementation, check out how they integrated the Coverflow engine into iTunes. I downloaded Coverflow before but never really tried it. Mostly because the type of viewing Coverflow offers, while extremely elegant, wasn’t something worth installing separate software for.

But since Apple has integrated it right into iTunes, then I have no complaints. Here’s a sample:

Videos

The playback of videos has improved tremendously. I can’t stress enough how responsive it is compared to the prevous build.

The Bad

Of course there are also some caveats that haven’t been addressed: it has something to do with how it handles audiobooks and podcasts.

Apple really has to find a way to let users SET which files are to be listed/treated as audiobooks – and podcasts for that matter.

Anyone who uses the podcasting feature of iTunes already knows that even MP3 files can easily be made “bookmarkable” without encoding to AAC – and we all know how bookmarking is important for audiobooks.

The limitation of the current system is that audiobooks and podcasts accessed via iTunes (wether the music store or the advanced method) are the only ones recognized as such.

If you so happen to have an MP3 audiobook (or if you rip a CD audiobook) then chances are you’ll see that in your Music library, same goes with manually downloaded podcasts you might have.

Next would be the new Album View doesn’t handle compilations well. If you sort via artist in that view, it will separate each artist [in a compilation] to it’s own album… even if it is, as stated, part of a compilation.

The Ugly

Nothing… it’s purty. It’s very much worth upgrading. If you’re one of those people who just wanted to be anti-apple and not use iTunes in favor of inferior alternatives… well then just stick to what you’ve got while we enjoy ourselves :)