Some features you might have missed in iTunes 7

on Friday, September 22, 2006

Besides the big changes in iTunes 7 there have been some minor changes that are still pretty useful.

Here's a quick recap of a few major features:

• Coverflow built in, new views to flip through album covers and video thumbnails
• iTunes Music Store is now just the iTunes Store
• New look, no more brushed metal
• The menu on the left is more structured and easier to navigate (for me)
• Games support

And now some of the smaller gems are listed below.

Video controls

Similar to the Quicktime full screen controls, iTunes now sports video controls as well. It was really annoying to have to exit fullscreen to control the video, and now we don't have to. The controls are available when you have a floating video window open as well as when you're full screen.

Smart playlists

It's always bothered me that I couldn't remove tracks from smart playlists. After all they are supposed to be smart, so they should remember customizations to them since even the basic ones do that. They're getting smarter. You still can't add arbitrary tracks to one, but I've never wanted to do that except just now to see if you could.

Gapless playback (and more)

You can set tracks to be part of a gapless album, and your iPod makes use of that information too. Sweet. Another new flag is "Skip when shuffling".

There's also a new field for audio named "Album Artist", but I have no idea what that means.

More video metadata

For videos you can now set the Show, Season Number, Episode Number, and Episode ID for each video. Why they let you do this for Movies and Music Videos I'm not sure, but there it is.

What's still missing?

I want to be able to change more than one movie's type to Movie, Music Video, or TV Show at once. Manually doing it for more than one season of a show gets old very fast, and I'm reluctant to write a program to let you do just that but I may if I have time.

I'm sure I have other gripes, but honestly iTunes is a full-featured app and while there's room for improvement they do get a lot right with it as well.