New iTunes

Woo hoo! There’s a new iTunes (mp3 player for Macs) out. more…

I gotta say, I’m digging their smart playlists that allow you to apply some minor filters to find songs. However, to get the best out the filters, you really need to go through and rate all your music (another new feature). Do you have any idea how long it’s going to take me to rate over 4,000 songs? Some of this stuff I haven’t listened to since I was 16 for cripes sake. Even just listening to the hooks will take me weeks. I could cheat and rate them without actually listening to the tracks, but I don’t really trust my rating in a single sitting much less based on remembrance.

The other feature I was excited about is their Sound Check that is supposed to analyze your music and play all the songs back at the same volume. Now even though I encode all my own music, different CDs seem to come out louder or softer. Not a big deal (except at work where I’d like to maintain a constant volume) I guess it kind of works, but it distorts the sound of the song in a really unpleasant way. And, the iTunes requires OS X which I’m not really ready to run at work yet.

All in all, some good and some bad. They also announced a new 20 gig iPod which I’m probably going to have to get. I have about 25 gigs of music now, so I’d almost rather wait for the 30 or 40 gig model, but I don’t know if that’s even on Toshiba’s (makes the hard drive) radar right now.