iTunes 5: First Look
Apple finally released iTunes 5.0 today after almost two years with iTunes 4. New features are plentiful and not just the UI was updated. The UI interface enhancements are great though with the cleaner interface you have more room for songs and listing in the iTunes Music Store. The top bar is thinner and allows for more space below and the brushed metal sidebars were removed allowing for more space on each side. Those of us that like organizing by different ways our music or creating very long playlist titles are in luck with this added screen space.
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Speaking of playlists, we can now create folders to hold playlists in like I have a New music folder with sub smartfolders that have rap, pop, rock, metal and dance that was added in the past month. This way I can listen to the latest tunes I have bought and keep them in a collapsible folder. I also have a folder full of my fav this, most played, top rated and such. This is a similar idea that was used in iPhoto version 5 which I use a lot as well. I can create a Macworld Folder with subfolders of days and events.
Search has been greatly improved. Apple had to change the way you search in iTunes since you have thousands of songs and the fact that you can now have PDFs and videos in iTunes that you purchased from the iTMS. When you start searching you can narrow your search by artist, album and title (similar to the way you did in the search bar by clicking on the magnifying glass before). You can also narrow your searches to music, booklets, videos and podcasts.
There is not the ability to place lyrics in songs that you have gotten and I believe you can view this on the iPod similar to how you read the notes from podcasts. You can hit select while listening to a podcast to see their show notes / description of that show. The Preferences has now grouped Importing, burning and general into the �advanced� tab. The parental controls tab has been added and you can now modify how smart shuffle works while listening to music. Shuffle in iTunes is turned on by hitting the �shuffle� button at the bottom left side of the player or switching to �party shuffle� mode.
Another great tidbit is navigating to the �edit� menu and clicking �show search bar� from there you do not have to search for things but can easily click �videos, podcasts, booklets or music� and have the entire folder you are viewing or your entire library filter everything to show what you want. This is without searching for a specific title.
If you are trying to move your �playlists� pane out to see the full title of your playlists, you have to move your mouse to the right of where it says, �source� to move the slider over. That will do the job you could previously do before when the source menu was separated by a bar.
A few tidbits, the equalizer has become unchanged except for a UI redo it looks much better now. You can no longer see the number of the song in terms of what it is in your library. You can only see the song number while in playlists. My old itunes visualizer plugins work with this version just fine. And for those wanting uninterrupted playback on those opera or techno CDs, you can select those tracks and in the advanced menu click, �join tracks�.
