iTunes 8 impressions
 

I think Genius is just awesome....and it actually works which is always a good thing, and its really quick. Anyone else have any feedback?

the thumbnails of all of my Arctic Monkeys videos are the same.... even though they are all different vids...

apart from that this working well... the Genius thing has helped me discover loads of music from my yoof.. everything from Skid Row to Omni Trio... :eek:

I can't use genius because I don't have a credit card :(
it's really silly..

dude youuu olllddd lol :p

hahahaha... you know there is no escaping it don't you!

haha thankfully i have big brothers

Lies me n felix are gonna invent a machine that stops you getting old. :p

Unfortunately, I am the big brother :o

Just like we started making that perfect "personal files" hiding app that we never finished :D?

Am I right in thinking that iTunes 8 requires Tiger/Leopard? Quicktime 7.5.5 is also only available for Tiger and Leopard.

If so, then this looks like the official end of Apple's support for Panther. Of course, that hasn't been advertised as widely...

(looks like I will finally have to upgrade!)

The new visualizer is posessed of epic win.

I had to say it.

When they turned on the Large Hadron Collider near Geneva the other day and fired a particle, I think the process was captured by Apple and redirected to the new iTunes 8 visualiser ....

genius complains a lot that it doesn't recognize the song I selected so can't build a playlist.

which one?

That happens to me, quite a bit, too, but I have eclectic taste. That probably explains some of the odd mixes I've gotten.

However, it works quite well with my wife's library on her computer. She's very happy with it.

Hmm, I haven't tried to build lists out of my really odd songs. But for the ones that are more mainstream Genius is pretty, well, genius.

What scares me is that genius seems to know my library better than I do. It's pulling up songs that my friends put into my library and showing me that, if I had ever taken the time to listen to them, I would like them. On top of this, it keeps making playlists of songs I wouldn't have imagined together, but they work.

It's weird, yet again my computer makes me feel stupid...

PS- I just tried Genius with Neon Browns "Any Day Traffic", probably the must unknown band I have in my library. It was, I'm sad to report, a total failure. Even after updating genius (as I was told to do.) By the way, if you have never heard of Neon Brown, go and download them now! Very creative group, or duo I guess I should say. They guitarist usese a 10 string touch bass/guitar combo...it's pretty nuts.

The new default one.

Yes, it is. We tried it on my wife's music first, and I was very impressed. I especially like that the playlist can be refreshed if the initial results are unsatisfactory, although for her, that never happened.

The results with my library are mixed, but I'm going to set aside my reservations and listen to a couple of the playlists all the way through a few of times. Maybe it's a misunderstood genius.

And yes, I have already spent money as a result of it's recommendations (New Model Army - Lost Songs) I'll have to keep that sidebar closed.

I kind of like the standard orbiting particles visualiser now that I've gotten used to it. I don't mind Jelly either.

Am I the only one who thinks Itunes runs like a dog and therefore uses something else? Songbird is my app of choice for music and VLC for video.

Yes, and that's why you are the only person on the face of the planet that uses SongBird :). Sorry, couldn't resist...

I actually used SongBird for a while, but it was pretty unstable for me. Plus I could never quite get used to the interface. That being said, I thought it was fantastic for the most part, and I don't think I'd discourage anyone from using it.

With the most recent update, a lot of the bugginess has been resolved to the point it crashes less often than itunes and performs a LOT better. I use a MBP as my primary machine for work/play/whatever else, but all my music is stored on an older windows machine that has been relegated to server duties. Itunes seemed to get quite ornery with that setup, whereas Songbird does not. With that said, I use Firefox, and pretty much can't stand Safari either. I love the Mac interface and wouldn't trade my MBP for any other computer that's available...

Except another Mac. :D

The extensibility of Firefox is sorely lacking in Safari, and I have used FF since version 0.8 so I don't see that changing anytime soon even with the quirks of the Mac version. The Firefox debate is a bit beyond the scope of the thread, however, so I'm going to shut up now.

I don't like how pressing return when a song is highlighted now starts playing the song instead of making the title/artist/album/etc. editable. It's inconsistent with the rest of the Mac UI.

I'm pretty certain that's been the behavior throughout the existence of iTunes. I have version 2.0.4 on an old machine and it behaves this way. However, whether on a laptop or using a full-size keyboard, pressing the Enter key will go into Edit mode.

Yeah, I think it's always been that way. But I wish they would change it to be in step with the rest of OSX's UI. It would make things much easier to edit...

I have often used the return and enter keys to make the fields editable, at least until iTunes 8.x. Doing more than a few tracks manually makes using the mouse/trackpad a pain, since I have to single click twice (without inadvertently double clicking) in order to make the fields editable. Finder still behaves as always; it appears only the behavior of iTunes has changed.

I've checked this in iTunes versions 2.0.4, 7.7.1 and 8.1.1 and they all behave the same. Pressing Return begins playing a song and pressing Enter goes into Edit mode.

Ah, so all I have to do is hold down the Command key if I want to edit, eh? Never knew that, learn something new every day I guess.

Well, that's not what I meant, but I see you're right that Command-Return does work for going into Edit mode.

When I said the Return key, I'm referring to the key directly above the right-side Shift Key. For Enter, I'm referring to the Enter key on the Number Pad or, on notebooks, in two places: 1) Function (FN)-Return or 2) on older models made before the Chicklet style keyboards, the Enter key to the right of the Space Bar.

I couldn't tell you why there is a difference, but the behavior has indeed changed on my machine for version 8.

Oh, sorry, I should have mentioned I'm on a laptop. So, command+enter is the best way for me to do it...

I know what you mean, but you demonstrated a frequent source of the confusion. I presume you mean Command+Return, but people often speak of Return and Enter interchangeably when they are distinct, though sometimes they will perform the same function.

Simple Example: In Photoshop, if I am entering text, pressing Return is the same as in any text editor and it inserts a line break. If I press Enter, though, it takes me out of text-editing mode.

But, yeah, you could use either Command-Return or use Fn-Return (which on Apple notebooks is equivalent to Enter) for entering Edit mode in iTunes.

Hmm, I didn't know that this was such a complicated topic! I wonder what other applications I use that have another function for enter that I don't know about...

Well, there's a good chance I made it sound more complicated than it is. Plus, the overlap of functions between the keys doesn't help. For example, in any dialog box with a default button which is shaded, pressing Return or Enter works the same. But these other times – such as this iTunes issue – there is a distinction which can make it confusing for people, and J Christopher alluded to this since pressing Return on a selection in the Finder has a different effect than pressing Return on a selection in iTunes.

The other one that confuses me is the difference between delete and backspace, which I don't even think I have on my keyboard, so maybe I should forget about it...

On Mac laptops (maybe aluminum keyboards, also?), pressing [delete] once will delete one character to the left of the cursor. pressing [fn]-[delete] will delete one character to the right of the cursor.

This assumes nothing is highlighted and the user is using a "left to right" language.

There should be no issue with the big aluminum keyboards, as it has a dedicated "delete" key.

Actually, they're both called delete keys, but the one located above the arrow keys is marked with a right-pointing arrow.

On the smaller aluminum keyboards, I think you get an fn key, and it's just like the MacBook/Pro keyboards.

The other way to do a forward delete (to the right of the cursor), is with Control-D. I like this simply because it can be done with one hand.

I'm guessing this is from emacs, and if so I imagine it won't work in non-Cocoa applications.

And now I know how to delete things on the right side of my cursor! Wow, I've learned two very important things (both of which I probably should have known years ago!) Fun :D.