Seven

So by now most everyone knows about iTunes 7 being out, and I’m too late to write a review. But since I spend the majority of my waking hours connected to some sort of digital stimuli, I want to talk about it anyway.

First of all, I do think overall 7 is a small step backwards. It adds a lot of superfluous bells and whistles that slow it down and take away from the simplicity that made it so great from the beginning.

With that said, iTunes 7 has two new features that I think are awesome: cover art downloading and skipped tracks.

The cover art thing is pretty obvious; it was one of the biggest features headlining this release. But what maybe not everyone knows is that the list of albums for which cover art is available includes international iTunes stores. To me, this is the awesome part. A good portion of my music library is Japanese, and I’ve always had trouble finding decent quality album art for those tracks via Amazon or Google Image Search. But much to my surprise, iTunes has found art for almost every foreign track I’ve thrown at it.

Skipped tracks are more of a hidden feature, and will require some explaining. In addition to the already rich set of metadata iTunes recognizes for tracks (such as Last Played and Play Count), it now remembers Last Skipped and Skip Count. A “Skip” seems to occur whenever a track begins playing, and the >> button is pressed, skipping to the next track. There is a small (2 seconds or so) window at the start during which skipping is not counted as well—it seems to be congruent with the window during which pressing << will return to the previous track rather than rewinding the current one.

Skipped tracks are important to me because of the smart playlists I use to keep a regular song rotation. I won’t go into the details now, but skipped track tracking makes my rotation far more functional. And these consolations are why I’m willing to accept the new flaws in iTunes 7.