“Over the span of about a year, Apple’s iTunes Music Store has gone from being a concept to being the dominant player in online music retailing: It commands over 70 percent of the market, has sold 70 million songs in its first year of operation, and now offers over 700,000 tracks. And Apple has again updated its iTunes utility, letting buyers make better use of the store and the tracks they purchase there (as well as the ones they rip from their own CD collections). But while iTunes is still a top-tier player and store, the improvements in 4.5 turn out to be less interesting in practice than they are on paper,” PC Magazine reports in their review of iTunes 4.5.
“While it may be fun after future improvements, iMix is less than thrilling so far. Looking at other people’s song lists isn’t all that fascinating, and there’s no way to post comments on mixes; all you can do is rate them from one to five stars,” PC Magazine writes. “…iTunes finally delivers jewel-case printing with this release. The feature is easy to use, but here again, customization is lacking… It’s a one-size-fits-all option that’s leaves no room for creativity… Windows users with WMA song libraries will appreciate a new feature that converts those tracks into AAC files (which can be played on iPods). It works well, but only on WMA tracks without digital rights management (DRM)
I feel much better knowing PC Magazine likes it.
PC Magazine is the least M$ centric of the consumer magazines. They give a fair and objective analysis of products, Mac and PC. Not even Mac mags are as fair-minded.
pkradd, as long as that Lance guy isn’t spouting about how one vulnerability on a Mac makes it as dangerous to use as windoze. Remember that doozy of an article?
It would be nice to see Apple expand upon the iMix feature. But it is still kinda cool.
You can combine smart playlists with iMix if you want to create really good party mix. First you create smart playlist with all the music and artists of your choice, then you let the iMix to mix that particular playlist. What more can you wish?
i don’t know if i read it wrong, but they did say they liked napster better, right?
The latest update to iTunes isn’t so spectacular because it already satisfies so well.
Off-topic: I’d like to see Apple do for ebooks what they did for music with the iPod and iTMS. Imagine an Apple-made reader with that new, thin “epaper.” Since the term iBook is already in use, maybe Apple could drop the ‘L” and make it ‘iBrary”? Now imagine a uniform format, like Acrobat/PDF, but without the crippling DRM that presents more trouble for the honest end-user than for pirates. (I’ve had ebook authorizations knocked out by minor OS updates.) Jobs sweet-talked lots of music publishers into accepting the iTMS terms. I’d like to see him do it for ebooks…because there’s nothing good on TV.
meanwhile, dumba$$ says you can only choose one library or list for party shuffle, but he never even tried to just drag and drop additional songs, albums, artists, or playlists in there. Works like a charm, buddy.
Yeah, CDR, you read that correctly. Interestingly the only post on the article challenges that and there is no response. Actually, the only post challenges the entire article based on their preference for Napster. As in, does Napster offer anything even close to any of the new features? Does Napster offer anything even close to many of the OLD features? Of course, the answer is NO.