iTunes 7.0 is definitely an odd one. I didn't have any of the problems that with installation that people talk about below; it installed fine, and it plays songs fine. The only thing that seems to have gone astray is that my imported music videos (mpg) no longer show up under Movies. That may be connected to the Get Info panel, where I can specify whether the video is a movie, music video or TV series, but the options below are only for TV series - something wrong there, I think. Oh, and I installed it on two machines, an iBook G4 and a MacBook.

Importing does seem to be slower - about half-way through a CD it reached about x24 on the MacBook, and now it only reached x20 on the last song. Could be down to the CD itself, but I wouldn't be surprised to find that import on a G4 is more greatly impaired, given Apple's move away from that architecture.

Nice features: gapless playback (finally) is most welcome, although the title is a bit unclear. There's an checkbox which you can select which specifies that a given album is 'gapless' - but you don't actually have to select that to get gapless playback. Everything is now gapless by default, in fact - so long as you have Crossfade Playback switched off. What the Gapless Playback option actually does is override Crossfade Playback - so you can have crossfading on and still have the Pink Floyd albums play properly.

The Import Artwork is nice, but that's about it - you're obliged to sign up with the iTunes Music Store, and then iTunes will automatically download the artwork. If it can find it. If it can't find it, then iTunes sends a message to Apple. Implementation isn't that good - for the soundtrack to The Million Dollar Hotel, which has some U2 on it, iTunes downloaded the cover to the U2 greatest hits. I'll stick to using the Export Artwork app for heavy duty artwork collection/selection.

There's now three ways to browse your library, and that's nice, although the Cover Browser is perhaps a little bit like turning magnification on with the Dock - great for showing off graphics, but ultimately more awkward and time consuming than anything else.

Then there's the interface issues. iTunes 7 is somehow like a friend that's beeb done over by one of these make-up shows, and it doesn't really seem to work. First of all, you have to go hunting to find both the Equalizer and Visualizer: they've been relegated to the View menu, which no direct access from the iTunes window. What's up with that? And speaking of the Visualizer, the font size of the song info has been reduced, as has the size of the artwork in the corner. I normally leave that on permanently, so I can see what I'm listening to at a glance - and now I have to squint. Too small.

Someone commented below that the interface looks like Linux - which is true enough, but what it reminded me of most was iTunes for Windows. All those box-like buttons and so on. It's kind of like the iTunes being ported back to the Mac. When you select a folder, it's now highlighted black - eh? what was wrong with aqua blue?

Here's my worry with interface: iTunes and the iTMS are obviously gateways for Windows users to enter the Wonderful World of Mac. And the interface developments in iTunes 7.0 seem designed to make Windows users feel even more at home on Macs than before, by having iTunes look and feel like it does on XP. The problem is that it no longer looks and feels like it did on OS X. That's my impression, at least. And while there are some nice features (Gapless Playback - Yay!) too much of what gets added to iTunes is focused on bait and switch methods, rather than pure and simple functionality. So we have a flawed implementation of artwork importing to get people to sign up for the iTMS, while Visualizer and Equalizer are told to stand in a corner and face the wall.

In summary, iTunes 7 is better than some of the previous major releases, which seemed to only add something new to the iTMS. But it will take some getting used to. At least it's free.

Btw, does anyone remember when iTunes was only about a 7MBs download? Good times…