iTunes 7 Early First Look

[Moozik: Erasure - Don't Dance]

I'll have a further play later but for right now I have my brief "well I've played with it for about 4 minutes" first impressions.

After installation, iTunes proceeded to wander over my entire music collection "Determining Gapless Playback Information" and I had no say in the matter. It would appear that iTunes 7 now supports gapless playback. Which is nice. Now if only my iPod supported gapless playback. Oh well, can't have everything :-)

While iTunes was keeping itself amused determining gapless playback info I took a few seconds to see what have visually changed. iTunes itself has received a slight makeover. I think it looks more elegant with its use of new clean icons and clean space. You can also now view your music collection in one of three ways. The first way is the standard list view, the second is the new grouped with artwork view, and the third is the rather interesting cover browser[0] which reminds me of thumbing through CD collections looking for that song you know is on the album with the red tree on the cover. Or something.

And speaking of covers brings us to cover art. iTunes 7 handily includes a feature in which it will go and automatically fetch missing album artwork for you. A feature I took full advantage of current temporary dialup situation not withstanding :-)

So yes, more playing required but I like what I've seen so far.

[0] coverflow.