My favorite features from iTunes 7

iTunes 7 is here, and, while it’s not perfect, here are my favorite tidbits, based on first impressions.

The Album Artist field, for all those pesky compilations. I hope all those people who’ve been putting “Various Artists” in the artist field will finally come to their senses. Now all I need is a “Featuring” field. Maybe support for multiple artists too.

It looks like the song has too be in the iTunes Store for iTunes to be able to retrieve cover art, which makes perfect sense, but leaves me chasing covers for my Radiohead albums.

iTunes now has rudimentary backup management for purchased items, which is something that I’ve idly intended to write. It could be a little more intelligent, by grouping purchases by show or artist and then prompting you to backup when it has a full cd’s worth of items to burn. It’s a tradeoff between more regular backups or more organized backups. I’d personally prefer to have my Battlestar episodes on one set of cds, and my music on another set. Then again, it’s not like I’ll be using these backups regularly, and it’s not like I couldn’t fit an entire backup onto one DVD.

Another thing I played around with is a way for using skip to affect a song’s star rating. No need anymore, as iTunes now has a skip count. There’s no easy way to combine that with the play count, though it should be pretty easy to write a script to use these two counts to set a song’s star rating.

Apple’s decision to purchase CoverFlow rather than recreate it is good news for Mac developers, and it’s pretty cool to see it being used in the store as well.

I sometimes fantasize about porting the Cocoa framework to Windows. So, while there’s no real connection, I did get a little excited when I saw Apple Software Update on Windows. John Gruber would probably considered Cocoa on Windows a non-runner, he’s is adamant that Apple is a hardware company, and putting more Apple software on Windows won’t make Apple hardware anymore compelling. I’d disagree, I think it’s important to make Apple the company more compelling, and bringing iLife to Windows would certainly do that. It’s the inverse of the Google OS argument, which is, if Google’s applications are the most important applications to people, then these people would switch to a Google OS. In Apple’s case, they have the OS and they have the applications. They just need to get these applications into the hands of Windows users. An even more interesting scenario is what might happen if 3rd party Mac developers had a cross platform Cocoa framework. Would their apps be successful on Windows? Could Mac developers eventually become the most important developer group on Windows?  Would the world be a better place?

P.S. It should really be noted that a lot of the improvements to iTunes are already in Windows Media Player.