Battlemouth

Turn on my Mac today to find that I have new updates for my computer, how exciting. Figured it would be a security update or something lame, but it was a Quicktime/iTunes update. My interest was perked, checked out the specs and this update had all intentions of hooking my iTunes up with all sorts of feature, like something called genius that makes play lists for me ,a new music visualizer, and apparently a new grid based way to view my music. As I type this it is installing and will require a restart, looks like this will need to be saved as a draft, I’ll continue in a few.

*elevator music*

Okay restart is all done and now iTunes is making a thumbnail of all my album art…. this is taking forever, I assume its for the new grid view. Things that take forever make me restless so I’m going to go make some coffee while this goes through my thousands of songs.

*coffee music*

Back with coffee in hand, iTunes is sitting there in podcast view showing thumbnail images of all of the podcasts I listen to. Mildly different than the old pod cast view nothing too amazing, lets check out grid view.

Grid view looks to have replaced the view that was a hybrid of the album art view and the traditional text view. Now we literally have a grid of album art thumbnails that can be sorted by Album, Artist, Genre, or Composer. Mousing over an artist that you own multiple albums of will scroll through them and “play artist” button pops up. You can also toggle this size of the thumbnails, I liked making them super small lets me view tons of stuff at once, grid view has also assisted in showing me the last few albums I havent found art for, OCD.

Off to the left is a side bar for Genius, apparently I have to turn it on for it to work, lets give it a try. Looks like I need to be logged into the iTunes music store for this to work, right now Genius is “gathering information about your iTunes library” I swear if this is another lame version of that toolbar that recommends music to buy I’m going to be pissed. Also Genius has its own separate terms of use agreement you need to sign off on, I feel like big brother is all over my music library right now. Genius has just let me know that I can continue to use iTunes while it gathers my info, I guess lets check out the new visualizer while it spiders the hell out of my music.

Okay, not much to say here, new visualizer looks like a bunch of fireworks fighting a giant metal ball. Still feels like a lame screen saver that no one will use unless they’re on drugs. Lesson learned, never anticipate a music visualizer to be anything more than psychedelic barf. Genius is about 3% through my music library I’m getting another cup of coffee.

Back from coffee, its about 6% done, I’m going to play some video games and let genius do its thing for awhile…..

5 hours later its done, lets give it a try. Just as I suspected, its trying to make my buy music by recommending songs that it thinks are similar to songs I like. But then if i click the little genius button when a song is high lighted it’ll make a playlist. Surprisingly its kinda accurate and plays songs that are similar to the track I selected, pretty cool Apple except it makes my computer a sloth.

As far as I can tell thats all we’ve got for new features, I’ll keep poking around and try to figure some more stuff out if there is anything. Thanks for checking out me adventure with iTunes 8.0!