Being the unmotivated college senior that I am, I decided to take this evening and spend some quality time with iTunes and my 5th Generation iPod. A few thoughts:
1. Better late than never, “gapless playback” gives my iPod a new lease on life. I have a lot of albums, as I’m sure we all do, that have tracks which blend into each other. In the past playing these albums was a painful experience since I wasn’t hearing the art the way the artist intended.
No longer. The iPod gracefully handled everything I threw its way, from Mae to MuteMath to Carl Orff's Carmina Burana (just listen to the last two sections - glorious music). If I were being picky I’d say that I noticed a split second (and I truly mean a fraction of a second) pause between a few of the tracks. At this point I’m just thrilled with this feature that should have been in place since the beginning.
2. Thanks, Apple, for allowing my soon-to-be 1 year old iPod to stay relevant... and anything but obsolete. Customers like myself enjoy knowing that special Apple events might actually make the hardware they have better than it was before - not making them wish for an upgrade they can't afford.
3. The iTunes movie experience is fairly seamless. I purchased Bicentennial Man for $9.99 and commenced the download. I’m on a campus connection so my speed varies with the number of frat parties, but the 1.4 gig file took 2:06 hours to finish downloading. While I experienced a few glitches getting the video to play in iTunes (the “Now Playing” window looked like an LSD trip for a few minutes...) playback on my iPod and in Front Row were flawless. Congrats to Apple on getting digital video downloads right.
4. iTunes Movies should not be saved in Music/iTunes/iTunes Music/Movies. Isn’t that like clicking the Start button to shut down?
5. I can’t believe I’m saying this, but PAC-MAN rocks. The controls are intuitive and it’s just darn fun. Based on the way games are stored (a small file with the extension .ipg) I’m sure we’ll be seeing a torrent of them soon.
6. Downloaded films are divided up into chapters, which I didn’t realize until I placed the movie on my iPod. This obviously makes jumping around in the film much easier.
7. When it comes to movie quality, I can say that I was quite impressed. Granted, the MacBook doesn’t have the largest of screens, but at full screen the quality was as good as most TV/DVD combos that most students use.
8. There’s now a “Volume Limit” setting to cap the volume at which your iPod plays. Quite handy if you’re as anal as I am about hearing loss. [Edit: Ok, so this may have been put in place earlier... let's just say I don't check my settings on a weekly basis...]
9. The iPod integration within the regular iTunes window is very slick.
10. Is iTunes 7 a hint at the UI we’ll eventually see in Leopard? I hope so. It’s easy on the eyes and looks quite professional. It makes glossy and blue seem a little outmoded.
11. Bicentennial Man is a great film for the sci-fi buffs among us. Oh, and James Horner totally plagiarized himself by ripping the soundtrack for A Beautiful Mind from this film. Come on James. A lot of us listen to what you produce. At least mix up the chord structure...
These are my short experiences with the changes Apple introduced today. Overall, I'm quite impressed, which is saying something for a skeptic like me. It's always been the attention to detail that attracted me to Apple and it's apparent that considerable thought was given to these upgrades.
What have you discovered?
Recommended Comments