iTunes 8

So, Genius, HD TV shows, Grid view, and the new visualizer, the main new features of iTunes 8, look very impressive.

The Genius sidebar will ask you for permission to send your information to Apple, but thats not too weird now. It then has to startup:

This has been going for a few minutes, but I suppose a couple thousand songs should take a while.The visualizer is nothing short of amazing.

 
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Pictures cannot properly show how impressive it is, so for the visualizer I can only suggest that you try it out for yourself. I almost don't want to switch out of it so I can get screenshots for the rest of this post. It is similar to the magnetosphere visualizer but a bit more polished and a bit better.

The genius sidebar is less impressive. The recommendations are all to buy songs, not songs in your library, but when I ask it for recommendations in my library, it tells me there are none for some of my favorite songs, although some more mainstream ones work well. For instance, Fire and Rain by James Taylor gives Babylon by David Grey and Big Yellow Taxi by the Counting Crows, which I feel are both good recommendations. It gives 25 by default, but that can be changed.

Up to 100 recommendations, which is fair. More than that would not be a recommendation for most libraries, just a selection of a large portion. So the Genius function is impressive when it works.

The new grid mode makes things a bit easier to use and navigate through. As for HD TV Shows, I think its a good idea, and I wonder what the quality will be(in terms of bitrate).

 

Overall, this is a really great update, and frankly is very impressive all around. This will probably make me change from windows media player to iTunes for my main music player. Nice one Apple :-).