iTunes 8

I am a big fan of apple and what they do, I admit to being an iPod nut for a few years, and I am in love with my MacBook, I guess OSX just works for me better than Vista or Xp ever could, I prefer the simplicity... BUT sometimes I think it takes a while to realise what apple are doing to improve their products, especially software!

An example of this is the latest iMovie in iLife 08, this is not an editing package for film, but rather a piece of video organization software, set out much like iPhoto (which I do love). For my media studies I had to steal the older and BETTER version of iMovie to do my editing on, as it actually had the effects and things that I needed.

Yesterday night I downloaded iTunes v8, which I was looking forward to as I heard they have re-done the look of browsing artists and albums etc on your music library. I downloaded it and immediately fell in love with the Genius, an addition in the last version that will not only recommend new songs and albums from iTunes Store based on a selected song, but will create playlists using songs in your library with songs that it suggests go together well. Most of the time it gets it spot on! Back to the visual changes, the browsing is based on album art (although you can just go back to list view or the slide across album art thing which I really didn't get into), it lists the artists on a nice dark background with their album art, which is really neat, although it only does it on your music library on that computer.

My issue with iTunes was that when you plug in your iPod and view the music on it, you can not click on the "eye" in the bottom right hand corner (as it was on v7 and before) to view category lists at the top. You can do this on your music library but not on your iPod section, this bugged me because allot of my music I have on my iPod I didn't have on my MacBook as it is on my PC and I am lazy so haven't copied it across. On the other hand, downloading this iTunes gave me the motivation to put all my iPod music on the mac, so I found and downloaded a program that transfers songs straight from your iPod, and it worked really well (although I have 2 of the same album knocking about for some artists on iTunes now). So yeah, now everything is fine! :D I found the application on this great website: http://www.opensourcemac.org so life is good.

RIGHT, now I need to find some driving lessons so I can learn the basics before going to the States for my year out!