iTunes 5 quick observations
• Lyrics pane. You can now add lyrics to songs in the lyrics pane of the song info. Better than the old comments field, which had a relatively low character limit. I’m not sure how to access them in a meaningful way once they are entered, but I’ll bet a visualizer comes out soon that uses that information. Is it stored in the mp3/m4a file, or in some metadata? They don’t appear to be picked up by Spotlight.
• “Skip when shuffling”. Huh. It skips the song when playing back songs randomly. Ok, that’s cool, but isn’t the check box a better place to determine that? Putting it in the song info window makes it kinda hard to see at a glance. I foresee confusion about why songs aren’t being played. You can’t access this tag from the multiple track info window.
• Playlist folders. Awesome!
• Aesthetic. Well, say what you will, but at least Apple seems to have found a look they like. I expect Safari will get the same makeover in version 3.0, if not before.
• Shuffle randomness. People have always complained about this. Neat that you can now make adjustments to it. Not sure how useful this is, but time will tell.
• Search. It uses Spotlight for searching now, which is nice. A bit faster than the old way. You can search for particular media (booklet?), and sort by artist, album, and name.
(seriously, what is booklet?)
September 7th, 2005 at 4:42 pm
First post!
September 8th, 2005 at 8:36 am
Booklets are searchable PDFs that Apple is providing with certain album downloads now as a “liner note” replacement. Kind of nice.
• I love the new search bar, “Edit -> Show Search Bar”.
• I love the new minimization look.
• I like the new “borderless” window look. Lots more information on screen at once, which is good.
• It’s time for a new visualizer, ideally one that shows off Core Image. That “G-Force” styled OpenGL one is really showing its age.
September 8th, 2005 at 11:16 am
Hmm. I don’t imagine using the search bar too much. It is just a way to refine your search, right? I can typically type out a narrow search more quickly than I could use the buttons to narrow it down. Anyway, it is nice that it will sort based on different categories of data. And it feels really zippy.