iTunes 5 First Impressions

After a few hours of playing with iTunes 5, there are some good and bad things about it. Overall, it is a must have upgrade; yet a switch is still very subjective if you’re very used to Winamp or Foobar.

First off, this version feels a lot lighter than 4.9, the interface has been rebuilt for good and it seems you no longer need a powerful video card to scroll through the songs.

The top bar has been shrank in a very smart manner. The volume bar has been moved to the side of the control buttons, and every other component has been slightly reduced.

The preferences window has been re-sorted looking for usability and there’s some new “Parent Control” tab, which I don’t really care about. Song info now includes space for the lyrics within the mp3 tags, which is great; and some hidden tricks in 4.9 are now available, like the list of playlists a song belongs to when right-clicking it.

You now have more options to play with the Smart Playlist feature, like the range of dates or range of ratings. The mini-visualizer has been revisited too. However, probably the most important new feature is the re-designed Search Bar; which now lets you sort your search results by Music, Audiobooks, Podcasts, Videos, Artist, Album, Name, etc… And the best of all: it works a lot faster than the previous version.

Downsides

The search feature doesn’t come with a handy shortcut. You still have to click the search bar in order to jump to your song. Once you have your results filtered, you still have to Tab to focus on the playlist, and then hit Enter on your song. Down and Up arrows could be used for this, just like Winamp does.

The “Play Next” and “Put In Queue” functions are still missing. This is basic functionality for any jukebox nowadays.

The Smart Playlist features, despite being the most powerful playlist builder outthere, is still missing some easy to implement functionality like and/or clauses between query statements.

comments [3] | tagged as: Music, Software

2339 days ago, rovargas said:

i’m still using winamp only because of the lovely ‘j’ shortcut

winamp foreva!

2339 days ago, mdcastro said:

the global shortcuts and queue rocks!!

2337 days ago, shanlucid said:

yup I use itunes casuse i use the music store and ipod sync, but i seriously miss the enqueue feature of winamp. a must!

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