Itunes tag

I know, me saying stuff like that (my co-workers would be having a fit now… me liking another Microsoft product). But it’s true. The libraries new feature in this version is how it shows information. It groups songs by artist, then by album, with cover art and album details. It’s great to quickly run through a music library quickly.

I don’t know about iTunes, it has this same view (copy?) but it is slow and terrible so I’ve never had a chance to play with it.

My friends have said that making a playlist is so hard in WMP. But it’s a breeze as far as I can tell. I pop open the playlist editor (the arrow button next to the search box). I then just drag and drop stuff. If I want a single song, I drag that onto the list. Shift and Ctrl selections also work, just as in previous versions.

But here’s where the new view comes into play. I want all songs by an artist? I drag the artists name into the playlist. I want to add a CD? I drag the CD cover onto the list. Alternatively, if I just want to play that artist or album, I double click instead.

I do have some gripes with WMP11 though. For one, having no gap-killer is getting to me. I also like my cross fade, but WMP’s one is just crap. I’m also an avid user of Winamp’s Jump menu (if you don’t know - you press J in Winamp and it’ll pop up a searchable list of all songs in the current playlist, makes it a snap to play the song that is on your mind). Does anyone have any suggestions on getting these features, or shall I just get Winamp again?

iTunes is OK, I must admit. But recent versions have become pretty terrible. Cover-flow is slow and unusable on Windows (at least on my computer which has a decent graphics card) and, as mentioned, iTunes’ version of the WMP11 expanded view is slow to navigate as well.

Quick one today, procrastination isn’t good when you have an exam in 3 hours.

Now, people without a Mac can test their websites with Safari, as Apple announced Safari for Windows, along with some announcements about Leopard. This brings more choice to the browser market.

I’m kind of dubious about the following claim,

Safari has always been the fastest browser on the Mac and now it’s the fastest browser on Windows, loading and drawing web pages up to twice as fast as Microsoft Internet Explorer 7 and up to 1.6 times faster than Mozilla Firefox 2.

They even claim that Opera is much slower to render pages, which I’ve found to be false in my experience.

Steve Jobs quote that I’m also concerned about,

“We think Windows users are going to be really impressed when they see how fast and intuitive web browsing can be with Safari,” said Steve Jobs, Apple’s CEO. “Hundreds of millions of Windows users already use iTunes, and we look forward to turning them on to Safari’s superior browsing experience too.”

“Hundreds of millions of Windows users already use iTunes,” because they think it is the only thing they can use with their iPod. iTunes is a horrible and slow application. I can’t use the cover view as it is a pain to browse through and having the covers down the side (a view similar to that from Windows Media Player 11) makes scaling your library a pain as well. If Safari really is faster, which I’ll try after my exam, then I’ll update this here. But for now I see through Steve’s “reality distortion field.”

• Download Safari for Windows (beta)

After much of the typical speculation, and denials from Apple, New Zealand now has it’s own iTunes Music Store, launched today.

At $1.79 a track, it is slightly cheaper than other competing music stores in New Zealand, like Digirama and RipIt. Thanks to Mike for pointing this out, Digirama is actually cheaper. Not by a lot. iTunes sells songs at $1.79, and albums at $17.99 (most of them anyway). Digirama on the other hand is $1.74, and albums at $17.

There are a number of New Zealand artists on the store, including Fat Freddies Drop, Tim and Neil Finn, and Pluto.

To get to the iTunes store, download iTunes from Apple, and select the New Zealand music store from the picker at the bottom of the iTMS home page.

Russell Brown is taking great delight at being the first to announce the date of the store… however rumours have been spreading like wildfire since the Australian music store launched a year ago.

There is also an Apple Store too, with 10% cheaper products.