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September 13, 2006

iTunes 7

I'm no iTMS fan, but the new features included in iTunes 7 make me want to consider using it as a librarian more seriously. Right now I use iTunes 6.x for podcast subscriptions (synched to my iPod Nano) and occasionally for streaming to my Airport Express. I prefer to use Winamp with the excellent Remote Speakers plugin to stream to the AX, though. I use Foobar 2000 for everything else. iTunes 7's gapless playback and Cover Flow features are the most compelling to me. However, my workflow might still be convoluted in this scenario: rip/encode/tag with FB2K/Lame/FreeDB, load into iTunes library to index & get cover art, and hope that FB2K and iTunes don't mutually destroy ID3 tags. We'll see.

Posted by Alex Harden on September 13, 2006 7:22 AM |

Comments

Just so you know, FB2k v0.8 doesn't write ID3v2 tags, while iTunes does. I don't remember if they added that support to v0.9 or not, but it's something to consider.

If iTunes could just automatically read what files are in a specific directory like Winamp does instead of me having to import files manually every time, that would be ideal.

Posted by: Don | September 13, 2006 7:45 AM

FB2K 0.9 writes ID3v2 by default. The only oddity I've seen is that iTunes doesn't like something in some of the fields (related to Unicode support) and it throws an extra "unidentified character box" at the end of each string. I think FB2K 0.9.4 (now at beta 2) is going to address this. I should have some time to play with all the new goodies within the next two days to verify, although I'm pretty sure someone at HydrogenAudio will beat me to it.

Posted by: aharden | September 13, 2006 8:53 AM

I'm still seeing the annoying little boxes at the end of the metadata strings in iTunes 7, but I'm torture-testing with existing MP3s of DT's Scenes From A Memory and it's doing gapless playback fine. I've downloaded a few albums' worth of artwork and Cover Flow is a cool effect.

The new iPod interface/settings are quite nice and more informative. This is a decent upgrade.

Posted by: aharden | September 13, 2006 9:43 PM

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