Chris Curtis dot Org

Apple released iTunes 4.5 today, and after checking some forums to make sure nothing got nerfed, I downloaded and installed it.  Read on to discover the new features.

iMix

You can upload your playlists to the iTunes music store where people can browse and rate them.  It may sound odd, but I bet Apple sells a lot of songs, as there is a convenient “Buy All Songs” in the playlist as well as individual song “buy” buttons.  You can type in your own notes and descriptions for your playlist, just like the celebrity and themed playlists that Apple has been offering.

Party Shuffle

Plays from your library or any playlist (including Smart Playlists) and shows the last five songs played, as well as what’s coming up, and lets you reorder them on the fly or remove them if you want.  Supposed to be good for parties, but this is the first “nested Playlist” type behavior that iTunes has offered.  Here’s hoping they take this further.

iTMS Wishlists

When you’re browsing the iTunes Music Store, you can drag songs or albums into a playlist that acts as a wishlist, and now that all of the songs in your library and playlists have arrow-button links to the iTMS, it makes “save for later” purchases possible.

Print CD Inserts

This one sounded ok...and then I tried it and crapped my pants.  If you have a playlist selected that you are going to burn to a disc, just tell it to Print, and a dialog comes up with multiple options for printing the cover and insert.  The absolute coolest, by far, is the Mosaic.  Full color folding insert and it makes a collage out of the covers of the albums of all of the artists that are in that playlist.  Looks unbelievably professional.  Don’t worry if you don’t have album artwork.  There are tons of scripts and programs readily available for iTunes that will automatically fetch it for you.  And of course, songs purchased from the iTMS already have album art.

Lossless encoder

If you want lossless song files, but don’t want the filesize of AIF or WAVs, Apple has a lossless compression that will output files about half the size of the uncompressed PCM formats.  I suppose this is in response to people with iPods who are freaks about not using MP3 or AAC files.  I wouldn’t mind if the codec worked in Final Cut Pro, but it won’t, at least not yet.

WMV Import

This is solely for the Windows version, so I can’t report on how well it works, but Windows iTunes users can now import or convert their WMV files into iTunes.  News is reporting that Apple customers are up in arms, and then they realized that they don’t have and will never encounter WMV files and then they sat their butts back down.

Music Videos and Movie Trailers

I guess this content was available before, most of it anyway, but it’s now accessible through the iTMS.  I think it’s the stuff they normally keep on the Quicktime What’s On site, but this delivery method is a bit quicker, and I suppose will encourage more browsing.

Free Single of the Week

Yeah, I didn’t believe it either.  But there it is.  This week’s is Hero, by the Foo Fighters.

Altered DRM

DRM on purchased songs has been slightly altered.  Shared playlists now work with up to 5 computers, 3 more than before.  And you can burn a purchased song up to 7 times in a particular playlist without having to create a new playlist to burn from, 3 less than before.  I don’t mass duplicate cd’s, so the downgrade doesn’t affect me at all, though I still don’t like DRM.

Posted Wednesday April 28, 2004 in Interesting by Derek Jones

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