Macintosh Users Group

I'm just downloading iTunes 7, excited to see the new cover view. I have not yet managed to apply artwork to all of my albums so I really like to see that this is now integrated into iTunes. I wonder how long it will take to download a few hundred covers over a dial-up line.

Unfortunately win will be the first platform where I can test iTunes. Did I ever mention that I really need a mac at work? Something like your Mac Pro would be nice or a 24" iMac. Coming home and turning the MacBook on is always fun, going to work and booting win is crap (right now the auto update starts nagging me about booting even once more today). Either my boss has to buy me a Mac or pay me compensation for forcing me to use win. Luckily there is an Opera version available on win

Originally posted by lachralle:

I wonder how long it will take to download a few hundred covers over a dial-up line.

Well, Dashboard is practically useless on dial-up, so I guess this feature in iTunes probably is as well.

Originally posted by lachralle:

Did I ever mention that I really need a mac at work?

Ha ha! It took me 4 and a half years before my boss got me a Mac at work. It took a complete system shutdown for him to see the light to switch to the Macintosh. He bought the crappiest HP computer he could find along with a nice "free" all-in-one printer, scanner, copier and expected me to be able to do artwork on that piece of crap. It went out, not to mention the all-in-one machine went out about a month or two after the computer kicked the bucket. He bought a dual 2.5 G5 plus Adobe CS 2 Standard for the Mac. Been happy ever since.

I'm going to be getting a bit nitpicky. My designer side is showing its ugly head, but there's some things I wonder about iTunes 7. I love all the new features, but I'm just wondering if the new interface is a bit too much of a leap from OS X's native interfaces. I don't much care for how the sidebar is done with the all caps headers. I like the fact that they're organized that way, but I think that's too much of a departure in how it looks. Also selecting something brings up a black bar. Previous uses of a black bar in sidebars is when the window is out of focus. This is a stupid deviation from that convention. If they didn't want to use a bright blue there they could just as easily use that dull blue they're using throughout in the same style the bright blue ones are elsewhere. There's nothing else that's all caps except for "OK" in buttons. Speaking of buttons... I really miss the shiny ones that were in older versions of iTunes.

The iPod window is like a page torn from Vista. I'd like to slap the people who "designed" this upside the head. The iPod icon that shows in the window even looks to be what a Windows XP/Vista icon looks like. Why not just make a new iPod icon in that perspective that looks semi-real, "lickable" (coined by Jobs) like other OS X icons are? The information is organized well, but how does the look fit in elsewhere?

I like how the capacity bar is laid out, but it does need to look more Mac-like. This is REALLY what looks straight out of Vista (as in being ugly and amateurish). The blue is the blue from the rest of the system, and a contrasting color is naturally orange from blue. The overall look of the bar is just completely off.

This is all I have to say at the moment about it. My gripes about the new version are all visually based. Other than these visual problems I see the new version is great.

Khadgar, I couldn't agree more.
I hope Leopard won't look like this.

In addition I don't like that they removed the nice round button top right that served well everywhere, especially the burn button was nice but it also allowed to configure the animations. Burn is now a pure text button and configuring animations has moved to menus/prefs.

When it comes to native ui elements: I don't like that they changed the scrollbars (even if I have to admit that the ones they uesed look nice).

Functionality is improved alot, though, and it'll hopefully only take another hour to download the missing covers. Just for the record: Downloading 1959 missing covers over a single-line dial-up connection takes about two and a half hours ...

All in all iTunes 7 looks like a good update with some not so nice UI regressions. Searching through the available Cover art is big fun.

Originally posted by lachralle:

Burn is now a pure text button and configuring animations has moved to menus/prefs.

Yeah... I really miss the old burn button. It was just simple, yet completely functional; it's just like a mac program should function. Now there's a button that says BURN.

I've used CoverFlow for quite a while. It was sad to throw it in the trash. iTunes 7's implementation of it is quite nice.

But is it normal the iTunes' CoverFlow has to reload the covers a lot? For example when quitting iTunes they're gone.

I haven't had that problem yet. I don't have an enormous music library, though. The entirety of my music is maybe 6GB, most being 320kbps or higher.

Also if anyone wants to post stuff in this blog or make frequent posts of anything on a Macintosh nature it seems I have to make you a moderator to do so. I wish there was some other level of membership that granted permission to make blog posts.

Transferred tape music libranry into iTunes 7. When I go to playlist>file>get info>options>equalizer set ...to anything but NONE.
The volume drops by a tremendous amount. It was not always that way.
mel

@mel12 Might try asking that on Apple's discussion forums. More than likely someone there's already experienced the problem. I haven't had a problem with what you describe yet. Sorry .