Lewies Blog

I must be in the dark here. Here I am with a nice shiny iPod and I didn’t even realize that another version of iTunes came out until this morning by one of my commentors. I wonder how long it has been out.

A while back, I complained about the lack of playlist folders in iTunes. It appears that Apple got smart and gave us this feature. I can now create folders, and put folders inside of folders. This is nice because it allows me to categorize things and manage my playlists.

Unfortunately, the folks at apple forgot about the iPod itself. My playlists still synchronize, but the folders do not. So now all of my playlists still appear under the “playlists” folder, but I don’t see any folders. Unfortunately, I renamed a few playlists and now it looks horrible.

I created a “Decades” folder and renamed a playlist from “Decades: 1960″ to just “1960″ and put it in the “Decades” folder. I did this for all of my decades. I expected my iPod to have a “Decades” folder … but NO! I just have my 1960, 1970, 1980, 1990, and 2000 playlists showing up directly in my playlist’s root folder. I am so mad!

So any how, let’s take a brief look at what else they added. You’ll have to take these with a grain of salt because I am just really upset.

New Look - Streamlined design makes iTunes even easier to use.

The colors changed and I now have the ability to make fonts bigger. I guess that is considered making it easier to use? If they made it skinnable so that I could customize the look, then that would be something to boast about.

Search Bar - Find stuff fast and refine your search with the handy new Search Bar.

When I search for something, I can now click some filters (all, music, audiobooks, podcasts, videos and booklets??) and I can also search by artist, title, or all of the metadata

Smart Shuffle - Adjust random playback to hear what you want.

Blah, blah, blah. I hadn’t used shuffle yet as the play lists do pretty much anything I want them to.

Sync from Outlook - iTunes now supports iPod syncing for Outlook and Outlook Express on Windows PCs.

Outlook keeps badgering me that an application is trying to access it each time. Why couldn’t they synchronize with a program that I use like Thunderbird?

Playlist Folders - Organize all your playlists into folders.

They forgot to mention “in iTunes only”. We all know how I feel about this one.

Parental Controls - Limit kids’ access to the iTunes Music Store and sharing features.

Interesting, but I don’t need it. I think a lot of kids might be using this on there parents.

Album Reviews - Browse over 1,000 album reviews.

I couldn’t figure out how to access these until I realized they were stairing me in the face. Apparently the reviews are just a description by the iTunes folks themselves. Hey Apple, why don’t you let the community get in on this action? I’d trust a fellow consumers review before I’d take the vendors point of view.

The Complete Harry Potter - Download all six audiobooks or the Digital Box Set and add the collector’s iPod with Hogwarts crest.

I didn’t get this with the installation of iTunes. It costs hundreds of dollars in the music store. Where is my complete Harry Potter set that was supposed to come with iTunes 5?

iTunes for Your Mobile Phone - Sync music to the Motorola ROKR E1.

The Motorola ROKR E1 can only hold about 100 songs. It looks like Apple is just testing the waters with the Mobile Phone market. However, I do like the dancing girls on the phones website.

Tags: iPod, iTunes, Software, Music, Gadgets, Style

This entry was posted on Thursday, September 8th, 2005 at 9:35 pm and is filed under Entertainment, Hobbies, Life, Programming. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.