Coinciding with yesterday’s major product announcement, Apple has now also released its latest version of iTunes. This new version provides the necessary device support for the new iPod nano, iPod classic, and iPod touch, as well as a number of other new features.
The update itself lists other new features such as the newly-announced custom ringtone feature for the iPhone, the ability to play purchased videos with closed captioning, rating albums, and watching videos at a larger size within the iTunes window
So, here is the breakdown of some more specific information on the above features and some of the other things that are new and interesting in iTunes 7.4:
Initial Startup
As with previous versions, when you first start iTunes 7.4, it’s going to take a few minutes to upgrade your iTunes library database. This process can take anywhere from 30 seconds on a small iTunes library up to five minutes on a large iTunes library on a slower computer.
New Device Support
As the update information implies, this version of iTunes now provides support for the new iPod nano, iPod classic and iPod touch. Previous iPod devices remain fully supported, of course, as does the iPhone and Apple TV. As the newer iPod models only began shipping yesterday, our editors have not yet had a chance to get a comprehensive look at how they interact with iTunes 7.4. We will be sure to post updates when we have any new information in this regard.
iPhone Ringtones
Yesterday’s announcement indicated that the iTunes Store will soon begin selling ringtones for the iPhone at $0.99 per ringtone. To facilitate this, iPhone users will now see a “Ringtones” tab within the synchronization preferences in iTunes. This tab will allow for the synchronization of purchased ringtones to the iPhone, and as with other types of media content, the user can choose to synchronize all ringtones, or only selected ringtones.
As of this writing, the iTunes Store does not have ringtones yet available for purchase, so we are unable to test specific functionality with this feature, but we suspect that it will work in the same way as other types of content do for synchronization to the iPhone. It is not apparent how ringtones will appear within the iTunes library itself, however, as there do not seem to be any provisions at this time for a separate Library category in the source list.
Naturally, the “Ringtones” tab only appears for iPhone devices. Ringtones cannot be synchronized to a non-iPhone device in any form.
Also, for users who are wondering: The ringtones feature only allows you to purchase ringtones from the iTunes Store at a hefty $0.99 for a custom 30-second clip. There are no facilities built into iTunes to create or upload your own ringtones.
iPhone Address Book Synchronization
A small new feature has appeared in the iPhone’s “Info” tab under the Address Book synchronization. “Put new contacts created on this iPhone into the group…” now allows the user to specify an Address Book group that any new contacts created on the iPhone (and presumably the iPod touch) will be added to.
To enable this feature, you must first only be synchronizing “Selected Groups” rather than all contacts. You can then specify any one of your selected groups into which new contacts should be added.
Music Playlist Synchronization
Another subtle change has been made to the way in which music playlist selection works for synchronization. When selecting the “Music” tab from a device synchronization screen, selected playlists are now shown organized into their proper folders, with icons to differentiate between standard playlists and Smart Playlists. Further, the “Purchased” and “Audiobooks” categories appear at the top, designated by special icons:
Folders can be expanded and collapsed from within this view, and users can simply check/uncheck a parent folder to select all of the playlists contained within.
Although folders themselves still do not transfer in any way to existing iPod, iPhone or Apple TV devices, this does provide a more convenient way for selecting specific playlists from a large library.
Note that this change only applies to Music synchronization (playlists for Movies, TV Shows and Podcasts work the same way they did in the previous version).
Further, it would appear that the ‘Audiobooks” category at the top is omitted when managing music playlists for Apple TV devices. Although this may be related to the Apple TV’s inability to play audiobooks purchased from Audible.com, it also excludes synchronization of Audiobooks that may have been purchased from the iTunes Store, which are supported on the Apple TV.
Closed Captioning
iTunes 7.4 now adds closed captioning support for video playback. Closed captioning will only be played with video files that contain the necessary closed captioning information, but can be enabled or disabled from the iTunes Preferences under the “Playback” tab, or from the “View” menu in iTunes:
As of this writing, none of the iTunes-purchased videos we tested had any closed captioning information available. It is also unclear whether Apple will identify videos with closed captioning within the iTunes Store, or how this support will work with self-encoded content. Presumably third-party software developers will find a way to convert closed-captioning from other content sources to take advantage of this at some point as well.
The new lineup of iPod devices announced yesterday also includes the closed-captioning capability, and offers the ability to turn captions on or off within the “Video” settings. It is unknown at this point when firmware updates may be available to add this capabilities to existing devices like the Apple TV or iPhone.
Video Playback
iTunes 7.4 now allows you to play back your video content in a full iTunes window view. Previous versions allowed playback within the album artwork view in the bottom-right corner, in a separate video window, or in full screen mode. With iTunes 7.4 you now also have the option of playing back video content within the iTunes window itself.
This option is configured within the iTunes Preferences, under the “Playback” tab. Note that iTunes 7.4 also now allows you to specify different playback options for TV Shows/Movies versus Music Videos, so you could for example always view your TV Show or Movie content in a full-screen window, but only view Music Videos in the iTunes Window itself.
Preferences and Settings
Most of the remaining preference panes are largely unchanged, although it was noted that the “Apple TV” and ‘iPhone” tabs have now been moved to the far right-hand position:
The content of these tabs, however, remains exactly the same as it was in the previous version.
Album Ratings
Possibly the most significant update in this version of iTunes is the addition of Album Ratings, a feature that will likely be of interest to many iTunes users, but of huge benefit to those who rely heavily on Smart Playlists to manage their content.
The feature itself is not yet very well-documented, and can therefore be a bit confusing. The first key point to remember is that you need to be in the Album view in order to access or view the album ratings:
When viewing your albums in the Album view, you should also always ensure that you’re actually sorting by Album in order to ensure that all tracks are grouped properly. iTunes still rather oddly allows you to choose other sort orders in this view, which can result in a very confusing layout, since tracks will not be properly grouped with their respective albums if they are not being sorted by album title.
Once in the Album view, you will see a rating field below each album cover, which will appear similar to the track ratings. You can rate an entire album by simply clicking on this field as you would for a normal track, or you can continue to rate individual tracks.
If you rate tracks within an album individually, but do not choose a specific rating for the album, the album rating will show an average rating for all of the tracks within the album (note that tracks with NO rating do not affect this average). The album rating will be shown with hollow stars to indicate that it has been automatically generated by iTunes:
You can keep this default average rating, or override it yourself with your own specified rating for the album. Ratings you supply yourself will be shown with solid black stars:
Note that when you rate an album, all tracks within that album that have no rating will receive the album rating by default. These default ratings will be shown using hollow stars (as shown above), in the same way the average album rating is shown. You can of course override them later yourself by supplying actual ratings for each track.
Removing the rating from any album or track (ie, setting it to NO stars) will revert to the default iTunes-supplied rating for that album or track (ie, the average rating for the album, or the album rating in the case of individual tracks).
Note that these ratings do not appear anywhere except in Album view. Even Cover Flow view does not presently supply this information. Further, the current models of iPod, iPhone and Apple TV do not in any way provide access to this album rating information, although of course individual tracks can still be rated in the same way that they always have, and these ratings will be applied to average album ratings after a synchronization. It is possible that the new line of iPod devices will provide this functionality as well.
The greatest advantage to the new Album Ratings feature, however, is in its use in smart playlists. For those who would prefer to build smart playlists that include entire albums, iTunes now offers the ability to do this through the Smart Playlist “Album Rating” criteria:
This will allow a Smart Playlist to select ALL tracks within an album where the album itself has been given a certain rating, regardless of the rating of the individual tracks. More sophisticated criteria can be built to refine these selections even further.
UPDATE: Some Bad News - Windows 2000 Support
According to Apple’s iTunes 7.4 System Requirements, this version no longer provides any support for Windows 2000 users. The system requirements for iTunes 7.3 listed the system requirements as “Windows 2000 with Service Pack 4, Windows XP with Service Pack 2, or Windows Vista” As of iTunes 7.4, the only supported Windows operating systems are “Windows XP or 32-bit editions of Windows Vista”. Note that both iTunes 7.3 and iTunes 7.4 require at least Windows XP Service Pack 2 or Windows Vista for iPhone or Apple TV support regardless, however.
We have not yet been able to test whether this requirement will actually prevent the installation of iTunes 7.4 on computers running Windows 2000, but it is clearly no longer an officially supported configuration as far as Apple is concerned. It is therefore very likely that those users wanting access to the new iPod models will need to consider an operating system upgrade as part of the deal.
Sorting… What Hasn’t Changed
iTunes 7.3 introduced one odd behavior that we feel is counter-intuitive to the way that most other products work—the change to the default sorting order in iTunes. The basic change itself provided better default handling of symbols and characters at the beginning of track, artist, or album names, which was a beneficial feature for most, but it also made the rather odd decision to sort all numeric values at the bottom of its listings.
This behavior was so peculiar that we originally thought it was merely a bug or oversight on Apple’s part. As iTunes 7.3.1 and 7.3.2 appeared and this behavior didn’t change, it became apparent that this may have in fact been intentional on Apple’s part. With iTunes 7.4, this behavior remains unchanged, further solidifying that this in fact is the way that Apple intends to sort information within the iTunes library.
Unfortunately, this “numbers-last” sorting order is counter-intuitive to how most other software applications function. Other media players, be they portable devices or computer software applications, have always taken a numbers-first approach, as do standard sorting algorithms in Word Processing and Spreadsheet applications. In short, this new behavior is extremely counter-intuitive to what most experienced users would expect, and as a result is a rather odd change on the part of iTunes.
These new sort orders can still be manually overridden with the various “Sorting” fields within iTunes itself, but this seems like a lot of unnecessary effort to return to what is expected default behavior.
More to come…
The introduction of iTunes 7.4 corresponds with the introduction of a number of new products and features that are not yet available, including the new iPod devices themselves, iTunes Store services such as ringtones and closed captioned videos, and possibly even firmware updates for existing iPod and iPhone models. We will provide additional updates and information in this article and other iLounge feature articles as these other products and features become available in the next few days.Let’s hope they fixed whatever it was that was making me crash as well as countless other problems.
You can download it here.
