iTunes 4.5 First Look

A year after Apple released the iTunes Music Store, and iTunes 4, they have added many improvements. With iTunes 4.2 in October 2003 which brought iTunes to Windows, Gift Certificates, and other improvements, and now iTunes 4.5 was released on April 28th, 2004. There are so many new features, it is difficult to go through them all but bear with me as I give you a first hand look of all of the new features and how to use them.

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First of all, you can make your own playlists to publish on iTunes Music Store. For example, my Graduation playlist. I will be graduating in a few days so I put together forty songs that reflect how I feel when graduation comes around. From there, I hit an arrow beside the playlist name and I can add my own info to the playlist and fellow iTunes users can vote on my playlist and comment on it. If they like it, they can buy the entire thing or just single songs via iTunes. Of course, I don�t get to see any of the money but this is perfect if I want to send a link to my online playlist to other graduating friends so they can get the same songs.

Next is the �Party Shuffle� feature. This is great. Random songs are added on the fly and you can choose a playlist of songs or just your entire library. Then as songs play more are added. You can set up the preferences in the bottom of the iTunes window as to how many songs are in the list. Plus, iTunes tells you what songs have already played. This is not only good for parties, but is great if you want to just listen to random songs.

ITunes Wish List. Next, you can add songs that you want to buy to any of your playlists and they are saved. So when you play them you can listen to the 30-second clip and buy them right from the playlist. Going back to the graduation playlist, say I find another song like �Free Bird�, I can add it to my graduation list by dragging it from the iTMS to my playlist �graduation� and the 30-second clip is saved. When I want to purchase it I can buy it from within that playlist. All I know is I am going to have tons of 30-second songs in iTunes from now on.

The best feature is the ability to make jewel cases or print out song lists. For so long I have manually made song lists. In iTunes 1-4.2, you could export the song list but it would be plain text and have every bit of info like type, size, and genre and was difficult to read. All you do is select the playlist you want to burn and from the file menu hit �Print�. From there you can print a jewel case or just a list of songs. The great thing is, there are themes and iTunes will make an album cover for you with a collage of the album artwork. Very smart. I am going to use this constantly. Your Cds will look professional when you give them to friends.

Another feature in iTunes 4.5 is something I have sent to Apple for a long time. I have wanted a button that takes you to that artist in the iTMS from your library. For example, if you are browsing a celebrity playlist in the store and see Yellowcard; you click on the arrow by their name and you are taken to all songs by Yellowcard. I wanted this to be in the library and your playlists as well. Luckily that was added and it makes buying music from that band a whole lot easier. If you have Alien Ant Farm�s Anthology and want to browse their other songs, just click on the arrow beside their name and you are taken to the music store.

Finally a feature for the audiophiles. When Apple announced AAC this time last year, many rejoiced but when you could not encode at 320kb people were outraged and either stuck with mp3 or went with AIFF. AAC (Advanced Audio Codec) is just that. It has excellent sound but at smaller file sizes. A 128K AAC file is the size of a 128 MP3 but sounds like a 160k. AIFF files are huge uncompressed songs and run at about 10 megabytes per minute of music compared to AAC�s 1MB per minute. Apple worked to bridge the gap between AIFF and AAC. They announced Apple Lossless Format. This format is an AIFF file with AAC technology to allow for songs to be about 5 megabytes per minute. This enables a song that is half the size of an AIFF file but has the same quality. Note: These files are still five times larger than AAC files and unless you are doing high-end audio work, you won�t notice the difference. The problem with low bit rate audio files is when you play them really loud on large speakers the quality is horrible. Apple lossless corrects that but at a slightly lower file size than AIFF. This format is not for everyone.

So, we have a lot of new features in iTunes 4.5. We can host a party, upload our own custom playlists, print album art and jewel case inserts, and add 30-second iTMS clips to our playlists. With iTunes 4.5 and the iPod update, you have a good team working with you to make your music library the best ever. In my 4 hours of playing with iTunes last night, I experienced no problems at all. I am on OS X 10.3 and a G4. It worked fine and my iPod is fine as well. Try out the new updates at http://apple.com/itunes, and http://apple.com/iPod

Interesting site. Found it on yahoo (yahoo). Keep up good work!

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