Now the iTunes 7.7.1 update came along and it hopefully fixes some bugs (whichever those might be - Apple software tends to be bug-free, I think) and also represents progress in the Mobile Me cockup department. Apple’s customers and shareholders can rejoice to see their money going to an intern changing all strings related to ‘push’ services in iTunes back to formulating things in terms of synchronisation. The internet will also giggle at the terabytes of data transfers necessitated by this crucial change.

iTunes 7.6 needs to ‘upgrade’ your music library and it seems that Apple got the hang of ‘doing the right thing’ here – making a backup of your old library first and then creating a new, updated one. With that safety net in place the upgrading worked just fine for me, of course.

Great innovations in this update of iTunes include support for German film ratings in the censorship preferences as well as a new icon for Booklets (apparently files whose names end in ‘.itb’). As things go with Apple these days, a booklet file icon isn’t recognised by something looking like a book on the icon itself but simply by by putting the letters ‘ITB’ on the standard iTunes files icon.

And I suppose there are changes for the iTunes store’s upcoming film renting amendments inside. Not being able to access these from Germany at this stage, I have to suppose that things basically work but not quite as smoothly as you’d want them to. The old problem of coding for lawyers rather than for users, I suppose.

Interestingly the – ever disabled – entries for ‘extended subtitles’ vanished from iTunes’ View menu. But a new ‘Audio & Subtitles’ submenu appeared in the menu to the left of it. I suppose the old items are hidden in there, but I couldn’t get that submenu active or open with the files in my library (even though submenu items are never supposed to be inactive if I’m not mistaken). This does lead to the hope, though, that Apple may take the previously neglected issue of multi-lingual soundtracks and subtitles for films more seriously at some point in the future. I won’t hold my breath, but at least iTunes knows about languages like ‘Central Khmer’ now for some elements of its subtitle UI now.

Also for the benefit of iTunes store changes, we find some strings about renting stuff in iTunes and the application seems to require at least QuickTime 7.1.3 (rather than 6.5.2) now according to Apple.

To top things of – for optimum Windows compatibility I presume – iTunes now comes with a ‘safe mode’ (invoked by holding the Command and Option keys while it launches). This disables visualisers:

Yeah, um, whatever.

Changes seem to include ‘support’ for Apple’s user-hostile ring tone scheme in non-English versions now. Leaving me with a ‘Klingeltöne’ item in iTunes source list when first launching the updated iTunes. And that although there is no such ring tone in my iTunes library, nor will there be one, nor has my iTunes ever encountered a device that could use them. Visual diarrhea.

More subtly, iTunes’ look changed yet again. Quite possibly to better fit in with MacOS X.5. The window texture has a different shade and apparently the coloured plus-minus-times buttons for controlling windows are a better match now. Furthermore, there are slight changes to selected button’s glow and there are distinct graphics for inactive buttons now. It’s not exactly an obvious change. Spot the difference below and tel me right away which half of the image is from iTunes 7.5:

Another extremely welcome improvement is that Apple finally implemented an improved editor for smart playlists. So far the editor was limited by the screen’s size, letting you only realistically edit as many criteria for the smart playlist as your screen could accomodate with the window just extending off the bottom of the screen once you had ‘too many’ criteria. This made creating and maintaining smart playlists with many conditions (e.g. to display songs of all bands playing at a festival) frustrating if not infeasible. But luckily iTunes’ engineers discovered scrollable views now and improved things considerably with that:

Of course this remains imperfect because the smart playlist editor is still a modal dialogue. But I can live with that as I don’t edit smart playlists all that often. However, it’s a bit more of a problem that Apple apparently failed to actually test their changed UI and its localisations once again. Quite obviously, in the screenshot above, the smart playlist is set to match all conditions, i.e. to only contain songs which satisfy the absurd condition of being by all those bands at once. Which was odd because I specifically created the playlist to contain all the bands listed, i.e. the songs matching any of the conditions. A quick test revealed that the popup menu doesn’t seem to be wired to the application at all. Useless.

Apart from that iTunes now seems to be signed now, presumably for some smoother action or updates in X.5 (although I’m not really sure which feature of iTunes would currently benefit from that). At least in the way Apple currently present this technology it has a certain promise of making applications less painful to update. For some strange reason I also had the updated iTunes skip once during playback – which at least for Mac OS X.4 I consider to be highly unusual. Let’s hope that was just a glitch of the system rather than a change in the application.

Other observations (added later on): iTunes now warns you if you are dropping tracks on a playlist that already exist in that playlist. It gives you the ability to skip the duplicate tracks which could be handy. • A change which I would have expected in the light of Mac OS X.5 and Time Machine is a change of the library format to split it into smaller files to reduce the space wasted by repeated backups of the iTunes library. After all, you’ll end up with hourly copies of that multi-dozen MB file hourly by only listenting to music curently.

A recent problem I ran into might directly hurt their business: The store seems to be buggy in a way that it didn’t let me add a certain piece of music to my shopping basket. What happened then? I tracked down their feedback form and had to categorise my problem using a popup menu that didn’t contain any applicable words. Finally I could enter my question and submit it.

I didn’t hear back from them for almost a week, not even receiving an automated confirmation that my request arrived. Then I received an apology for the late reply and was told that they could try deleting my shopping basked if I wanted that. That wasn’t the greatest thing as I quite like using the shopping basket to store things I find interesting and which might buy in the future. But if it solved the problem, so be it. Their reply even contained the obvious, yet helpful, recommendation to take a screenshot of the shopping basket so you can remember its contents later on. [Interestingly, this came with links telling you how to take a screenshot for Windows, Vista and Mac – in that order and using those names.] The presence of such a well prepared answer suggests that similar problems aren’t uncommon.

I replied immediately, asking them to delete my shopping basket and a mere six days later I received an answer telling me that they deleted my shopping basket now. So I tried putting the work in question into my empty shopping basket again a few days later and things just kept failing, the work didn’t appear there. What a bummer. Thus I was back to writing an e-mail, telling them about the continued problems and three days later I received another detailed reply. And that reply offered a ‘workaround’ for the problem, telling me to switch iTunes to use ‘1-Click’ shopping and get the piece in that way.

Which in turn I didn’t want to do because ‘1-Click’ feels creepy to me. I don’t want a single click between my careless finger and my money vanishing, I want as many security questions and password question as reasonably possible. I also want to be able to compare two recordings of the same work. The only convenient way to do that in iTMS with its slow and clumsy navigation is by putting both of them into the shopping cart. So, no sell for iTMS this was. Thanks to their software being buggy and their support being extremely slow. In a brick and mortar record store such problems wouldn’t arise or be solved in a minute. At amazon (when I last had a problem with them a few years back) the replies from customer support were within a day.

And then another problem happened: A friend sent me some album gift certificates. Which I can appreciate. It’s a really neat feature of iTMS. In theory anyway. Because my problem here was that I already own both of the albums (one of them even coming from iTMS). So, knowing that Apple are real bastards and won’t let you exchange pieces you already downloaded and fearing that iTunes will immediately start downloading the albums from the gift certificates after I clicked the link in the e-mail message, I avoided clicking those links (that’s the paranoia that e-commerce and DRM drives you into!) and looked for the place in iTMS for ‘returning’ such gift vouchers. I was pretty sure that after billions of sold and ‘gifted’ songs I wasn’t the first one running into this problem.

I didn’t find a link for such a return or exchange and hence I was back to the iTunes support form, explaining the problem and asking for instructions to solve it. It took a number of days (I think about a week, but Apple not sending confirmation mails for submitted questions and not putting the date next to my request in their answer makes this hard to figure out now) for them to get back to me. They sent me an e-mail carrying the subject ‘Re: Gift’ (which in German means poison), pointing me to their terms of service and telling me that such an exchange is not possible. It’s like not being able to return a shrink wrapped CD that hasn’t even been delivered yet. That’s just ridiculous. And it also means that giving friends anything other than gift vouchers of a certain value is a very bad idea on iTMS. Essentially my friend payed for gift vouchers which I have now. Both him and me have the gift vouchers’ albums already and, thanks, neither of us needs nor wants a second non-transferable copy.

This plainly sucks and it’s a complete rip off. Apple could turn the gift vouchers into store credit for me (which might be tricky due to their album pricing not being as ‘simple’ these days as it used to be) or they could simply refund my friend his money and invalidate the gift vouchers. That should be fairly easy.

Otherwise, if you have a German iTMS account and you are interested in Feist’s Let it Die album (iTMS price €6,99) or the Phil Ochs in Concert album (iTMS price €9,99), I have some spare gift vouchers…

It seems that today’s update of iTunes to version 7.4.2 limits itself to change the main binary, iPod updater binary, the mysterious iTunes.icxs file and all the version numbers they could find. My guess is that this is to iron out some problems in support for the new iPods, iPhones or whatever. It doesn’t appear to bring any conceptual improvements.

And in fact, this time the iTunes 7.4.1 update followed the 7.4 version so quickly that I didn’t really get to use the 7.4 version just because I was away for the weekend. Obviously, after Apple’s announcements last week, the update adds support for the new iPods (there’s a new file containing the iPod touch’s license agreement, plus the new icons of course) as well as for iPhone ringtones. There is a new icon for ringtones now which continues the recent (and IMO sad) trend in icon design where all icons are the same and just an abbreviation or acronym of the file type’s name is added to the file icon. While this icon exists, it appears that iTunes doesn’t actually advertise it to the OS, so I wonder a little what this is about. Other news for the icons is that their files have quadrupled in size, which should be considered a bit of future proofing iTunes for the large icon support in X.5 (making it the second application, after Coda, that I am aware of with such large icons).

Internally, iTunes also adds icons for the ringtones entry of the source list and there seems to be the capability to display the charging status as well – for all/some of the new iPods I presume. Which certainly is a nice touch. It also appears that the blue in the shuffle and repeat buttons has become a bit bluer. Still no graphite, though…

Further new graphics are the outlined stars which are used by iTunes’ new album rating feature. I am still a bit split about that feature. I generally think it is a good idea to consolidate single song ratings into averages for the whole album and to make this work both ways – such that you can rate both single songs and get an average for the whole album out of that, or rate the whole album without any of your existing individual song ratings being erased. All that seems to be reasonably well implemented.

On the other hand, this doesn’t fit in too well with my personal rating scheme. The vast majority of the songs in my iTunes library are unrated. And the way I use the ratings to indicate favourites by giving them four or five stars just doesn’t fit into this new scheme too well. Particularly as I don’t think that an outstanding album needs to contain outstanding songs only. Of course the good thing is that I don’t have to use the feature, so it isn’t a problem for me. What may be a more realistic problem even for people whose rating style matches Apple’s idea on this is the fact that the ‘implicit’ rating of a song as gained by a rating of its album will be used for smart playlists as well. Smart playlists should also be able to distinguish between ‘real’ (solid star) and ‘implicit’ (hollow star) ratings as otherwise it’s quite easy to ruin ‘★★★★’ or ‘★★★★★’ smart playlists because they’ll start containing all unrated songs from brilliant albums where you possibly only wanted to have a select few.

An interesting sidenote on this may be that iTunes does provide information about the type of rating via AppleScript. Which is good not only because the new feature is immediately exposed in this way but also because it’d make me hope that if this is possible, allowing a query of that field for smart playlists will not be unreasonably hard to implement either.

A change behind the scenes seems to be that this version of iTunes cleans up the localised lists of sort prefixes which were introduced in iTunes 7.3. These lists used to contain a number of duplicate entries as well as different forms of capitalisation (The, the, THE, for example). While that didn’t hurt anybody but the people creating these lists, it seemed a bit inelegant and I kept wondering whether differentiating by capitalisation wouldn’t create more confusion than it’d have benefits. Apparently the people in charge of the list and algorithm in iTunes thought the same and now things are case insensitive and the list is free of duplicates (at least in the German localisation). Good to see that someone is still working on details in iTunes!

A quick look at iTunes’ strings suggests that localisations (for German anyway) have also been improved. These are subtle points (like using ‘Darsteller’ instead or ‘Schauspieler’ which is more typical for film credits), but iTunes will leave a better impression this way.

Another new feature of this iTunes release seems to be some kind of subtitle support. That’s certainly a good thing but I’m not quite sure what exactly it means. The help pages suggest the feature is about toggling ‘extended subtitles/captions’ (Erweiterte Untertitel) with dialogue and additional descriptions of what happens in the film. From the (single) example file I have this cannot be used to toggle on and off a text track that has been added to a film by pasting it in. It also doesn’t seem to toggle external subtitle files which QuickTime displays when Perian is installed. So the question is: The display of what kind of information can be toggled? And where can I get such files? Which will quickly be followed by: How can such files be created? Obviously, at the end of the day, we’d want all sorts of language and assistive subtitles (or rather both subtitles and captions, if you want to pick that fight) in a single file and be able to select the one we need. I somewhat doubt that Apple will include all that in their iTunes Movie Store downloads and iTunes’ current single menu item for the feature suggests that the implementation is much less ambitious than my plan. But here we go, it’s a first step and let’s hope (but not hold our breaths) there will be further steps and more information in the future.

A rather neat improvement of the application that I missed when first using it is that the menus with playlists in them (all playlists you can add the song to and all playlists the song is contained in) in the contextual menu now correctly reflect the hierarchy of your playlist folders rather than being merely alphabetical. I like that. Bonus points if you tell me the song I got the menu below for. (That’s more like big time bonus points…)

Finally, iTunes’ co-operation with the eponymous store has been improved. In particular there are ‘live’ search results now which list matches for the part of the search term you typed so far. Definitely a handy feature, particularly as the store can be rather sluggish when jumping to new pages, making every click less a good deed. Just as Inquisitor, however, it suffers from the problem that the width of the menu containing the instant search results is determined by the rather small width of the search field which makes it hard to read the full text of the found results. UI nitpickers may also feel compelled to add that the apparent ‘menu’ which appears in no way looks like you’d expect a menu to look and also doesn’t display any capital letters in search results. In short: a good idea, but we’ll at least need to wait until iTunes 7.6 before it is well implemented.

P.S. iTunes stopped displaying most of my album cover art in Cover Flow mode after the update and it ‘prefers’ displaying the generic notes icon instead. Any idea how or why that happens? And how I can kick iTunes to do the right thing again? Removing the ‘iTunesAlbum Artwork’ folder didn’t really do the trick although artwork is stored within the music files rather than in iTunes’ own cache.

The other upgrade is to QuickTime 7.2, the installer of wich seems to be a sorry example of software updater quality control negligence for some. While this seems to include a number of security and other bug-related fixes under the hood, it finally removes the braindead limitation from QuickTime Player’s UI that kept people from playing films in full screen mode if they hadn’t paid another 30$ to Apple for the privilege. Great to see that it finally dawned on Apple that this strategy is crap. Particularly as this limitation has always been easy to circumvent with a line or three of AppleScript.

This isn’t to say that QuickTime Player got fixed UI-wise, of course. It is still ridden with ugly ‘PRO’ labels in some menu items. Menu items which look inactive but still highlight when you hover about them in an Microsoft-worthy strike of UI brokenness. Similarly they didn’t make the effort to actually localise the QuickTime Player application, so we get the sophisticated prettiness of clipped and mis-positioned text in German. Which pretty much assures (but doesn’t particularly surprise) us that Apple’s quality control in this region has a staff of 0 assigned to this matter.

And while the straightforward access to full-screen playing is a welcome addition, it doesn’t go far enough. For example when it comes to subtitles. Only recently Apple added some kind of subtitle support to QuickTime (which made me and others hope that they will include multi-lingual subtitles to their iTunes film offerings, something that hasn’t happened yet from what I have heard). And more relevantly, or at least more immediately usefully, the wonderful Perian plugin which enables QuickTime to play real world video files rather than just those from the sanitised world Apple would prefer to limit us to, now has support for external subtitle files in QuickTime.

The problem with that, however, is that you’ll always get to see the subtitles when they exist. Even if you don’t want to. And that QuickTime player refuses to show you the checkbox to toggle those subtitles unless you bend over pay that good old 30$ fee – presumably because toggling subtitles – a feature that even a 30€ crap DVD player has built in – is just the kind of thing which only ‘PRO’ users should be able to do. Ah well. But as QuickTime and its player aren’t bad in themselves but only in their UI and marketing, AppleScript is once more here to help us.

And hence, here’s a simple AppleScript – based on rather simple heuristics – that lets you toggle subtitles in a QuickTime player. Add it to your script menu and things will be good.

iPhone

Of course the main reason for this update is yesterday’s release of the iPhone (as it is one of those mysterious design decisions that iTunes needs an update whenever Apple relase new music playing hardware). And this version of iTunes includes support for that devices. Ho-hum. Whatever. There’s now a useless iPhone icon next to the useless Apple TV icon in my iTunes preferences window. Both of which make me wonder whether Apple couldn’t have dealt with these preferences more elegantly. I shall just assume that the iPhone related stuff in iTunes works all right as I obviously don’t have access to such a device. Which means that even if it didn’t work, I could hardly care less…

Artist Sorting

However, there are more interesting changes to this release of iTunes. Let me start with the good one: Back in iTunes 5 Apple chose to destroy iTunes’ sane way of sorting band names in non-English localisations: Instead of ignoring the localised articles as well as ‘The’, Apple decided to revert back to the bad old times and just re-do the sorting for band names starting with the localised articles. Which of course meant that users of non-English iTunes version either had to have all the ‘The’ bands in their artist list stuck together (which is rather inconvenient for accessing them, particularly on an iPod), or that we had to manually patch iTunes to work around that problem.

This need persisted throughout the era of iTunes 5 (short) and 6 (longer). When iTunes 7.1 was released the game changed a little. Because Apple introduced additional metadata fields like ‘Search Artist’ which let you specify a different name for an artist for iTunes to use in sorting. In particular – when using an English version of iTunes – the application would automatically set the ‘Sort Artist’ for ‘The Strokes’ to ‘Strokes’ and good sorting would result from this. When using the German localisation while adding those songs to iTunes, though, ‘The’ still wasn’t recognised as an article and the songs were sorted along with the ‘T’ bands. However, you could now (in what must be one of the clumsiest user interfaces ever) manually set the ‘Sort Artist’ field and work around that weakness of iTunes that way. Still user hostile in my book (and still to be circumvented by applying the old patch which gives you German iTunes that extra English article), but at least indicating a new approach.

And now, with iTunes 7.3, we see a whole new chapter in this book. And a good one at that! Each localisation of iTunes now contains a list of articles which iTunes ignores when they appear at the beginning of a band name (stored in the file SortPrefixes.plist of each localisation’s folder). And – rejoice! – by default the list for German now contains not only ‘Die’ but in fact the whole list of ‘The’, ‘A’, ‘An’, ‘Der’, ‘Die’ and ‘Das’. Woot! This is a huge improvement which brings us pretty much back to where we left in iTunes 4.7.

Actually using iTunes 7.3 suggests that there have been more changes under the hood as far as sorting is concerned. For example, iTunes seems to internally replace punctuation marks by nothing – which automatically gives us correct sorting of band names like ¡Forward Russia! or …And you shall know us by the Trail of Dead which needed manual adjustment before. On the downside this means that a band like !!! is rather mis-handled and will not even get an entry in the artist list [or possibly an empty one at the end that cannot be clicked] (although, strangely, their music appears with their proper name on the iPod). When sorted by artist name, their songs also won’t stick together but be somewhat mixed with those songs which don’t have artist information. And even explicitly setting the ‘Sort Artist’ for the band doesn’t change that – in addition to the fact that the horrible batch ‘Sort Artist’ setting feature fails in this case. Actually trying out a new sort order before shipping it. And also trying it out on unconventional names, might have been a good idea.

Other things also changed. For example band names beginning with numbers will now appear at the end of the artist list rather than at the beginning. Not a dealbreaker, but still somewhat strange and changing the way millions of people see their music collection. If a bit overenthusiastic, these are generally very welcome changes and if they been implemented and tested well enough to not remove !!! from my artist list, I would have been happy. [The very strange thing is that doing a search for !!! will give you a !!! entry in the artist list, even though it’s not there normally.]

The ugly

Just the previous point would have made this a good update but unfortunately this version of iTunes shipped with a horrible bug which keeps people from upgrading to this version. What happens is about as follows: You first launch iTunes 7.3, it loads and displays your music library and then a window comes up telling you that your library is being updated. Previous versions of iTunes did the same and it probably happens to update its internal database. Nothing wrong with that (although having become a bit scary in recent versions because iTunes no longer creates a backup copy of the library before such an upgrade). Just that after the upgrade, many people were confronted with an error message The iTunes Library cannot be saved. An unknwon error occurred (-50). which - unless you tell iTunes to not warn you again will come up again a few seconds after you dismissed it.

So far so bad. The message is at least correct. It means that no changes to your library will be saved. And it also means that quitting and relaunching iTunes 7.3 will create another half minute wait for it to update your library. On the good side (in my case anyway), the updating of the library didn’t overwrite any of the old library and hadn’t destroyed any data, so my backup copy could remain where it was.

And I wasn’t the only one to have this problem. One particularly observant member of Apple’s discussion forums (fora?) – and noticing the general dumbness on these forums makes this particularly remarkable – noticed that this may be related to the separate sort artist settings. And he found out that the problem can be resolved by going back to iTunes 7.2, deleting all custom Sort Artist data from songs there and then upgrading the library. Obviously this option is only viable for people who only have few artists marked with custom Sort Artist data. Luckily I didn’t have many songs with non-trivial Sort-Artist data – particularly not many that the improved sorting algorithm of iTunes 7.3 doesn’t recreate automatically. So I followed those steps and the upgrade worked.

But it made me once more think that Apple just don’t test their software in any but the most trivial cases before shipping it to millions. They only recently introduced the ‘Sort Artist’ feature. And now they don’t even seem to be using it on their own libraries. No wonder that feature has a horrific UI. Apple aren’t eating their own dogfood here.

Other points

There are a number of other changes to iTunes 7.3. Gradients in the buttons changed a little, the selected item in the source list is now highlighted with a gradient rather than a flat grey (or blue I suppose) bar. The blurriness people saw in the Cover Flow scroll bar is gone. And the source list became even more idiotic. Now we don’t just have ALL CAPITAL labels all over the list but the ‘PLAYLISTS’ one can now be hidden with a disclosure triangle. Whatever benefit that is supposed to give us remains unclear but certainly someone at Apple considered it a smart move. Thanks a lot for wasting another 14 horizontal pixels or so on the whole height of my source list just for that superfluous ‘feature’.

Another thing worth noting for people who still hope that Apple will do some ‘right thing’ with respect to compatibility and ‘open’ file formats: The updater removed the mysterious file icons for Ogg (as well as for WMV and SND) filed from iTunes’ bundle. There goes the illusion…

That + business seems to be quite last minute. Not only because the magic month of May is ending really soon but also because the iTunes store didn’t look like it was ready for the + stuff and it took several hours for it to appear there. The trick, by the way, is to first go to your account settings within the iTunes store and activate the + stuff. The + titles will only appear in iTunes store listings afterwards and they’ll be marked by that + icon along with the ‘improved’ price. Double clicking the + icon takes you to an information page, by the way. Its German version currently makes nonsensical statements Mit iTunes Plus schaffen Sie ihre eigene Musikerfahrung – which presumably was With iTunes Plus you create your own music experience in English. It remains to be seen how I create a wholly new experience of music by using a different file format. That page even contains a link to frequently asked questions – which I found strange for a feature that has only existed for a few hours. But at least clicking the link just gives an error message unknown error (-9843) – so they’re somewhat reasonable there…

A closer look at the enormous iTunes application reveals that indeed most changes are in the help books, the binaries and that we saw the addition of an ‘iTunes.icxs’ file. No idea what that’s good for – my guess from the end of the file name would be some kind of icon but the file itself is just 30KB in size, so it probably won’t be a huge bitmap icon.

Other things I noticed are that the scroll bar in Cover Flow mode looked really blurry on my machine. Things improved after I resized the view (but somehow got worse again later on). I had never seen that problem before. In the German version they also renamed the music library in the source list to Mediathek – media-library instead of music-library – which I guess is technically more accurate for the current feature set of iTunes. Yet, it is a word that nobody – except some communist technocrats, I suppose – would actually use, so I consider this change to be a bad one. Particularly as this is precisely the name which I could customise to my taste in previous iTunes versions but which they fixed in the iTunes 7 update for some reason.

The ‘Store’ part of the source list also seems to lack the item containing the stuff you previously bought in the store in this version. I always thought it was quite convenient for simple drag and drop backups and reassuring by its mere existence. While I can build a smart playlist working on the file type to presumably give the same results (actually that’s not trivial as it will be hard to make this foolproof in the sense that it is independent of you current language and potential changes of Apple’s naming conventions or file formats), that solution seems cumbersome in comparison. Update: It turns out that this list didn’t vanish, just that my iTunes seems to have lost all its contents, making the list disappear. I also learned that this playlist isn’t smart at all but can just be manually edited once it exists to restore its old state.

Finally, problems: The artist sorting brokenness in non-English versions remains and when using the German version you still have to manually mark ‘The’ bands to be sorted correctly. (Yeah, I guess this is a case of works as specified but it’s still stupid enough to bring it up occasionally). Another problem is speed. This version definitely feels slower than the previous ones and I have seen plenty of multi-second stalls while using it. I cannot really reproduce the problem, though, so I’ll irrationally hope it may be some post-update glitch.

And what about the iPhone? The fact that no iPhone strings or images are found in the iTunes application suggests that we will see yet another iTunes update within a month. Couldn’t they at least have saved us that hassle? I guess paranoia and tight deadlines make that a ‘no’.

John Gruber actually read the terms and conditions and discovered that they keep you from using your iTunes + songs as ringtones. Now why’s that. Couldn’t they do anything without a ‘but’? And of course your DRM free purchases will be marked with your account name. Also: Some new Mix-Burn-Rip bug.

With Apple and EMI announcing reasonably high quality tracks that aren’t encrypted, it looks like my main reservations about the store are going to be addressed by the store in the near future and I will fell much less sceptical about buying songs with them. It seems that doing this does destroy the Store’s simplicity of a one-size-fits-all model and I wonder whether this might be resolved some day when all labels manage to agree to sell their songs in the unencrypted format.

But there’s no giving without taking in the business world. And the higher quality and improved DRM situation comes at the cost of a 30% price increase. For single song purchases at least – it sounds like there will be no such price penalty for the better format if you buy whole albums. That’s not perfect, but it sounds like a situation that’s tolerable for single song purchases (and equivalent to printing money for Apple and the labels, particularly with the option to ‘upgrade’ your existing purchases).

The movement on the album front also seems interesting. Not only because of the option to ‘complete’ single song purchases to the whole album at the cheaper full album price. But also because all of a sudden – at least for those EMI albums at first – the iTunes Music Store offerings start looking like actual competition to CDs: Both their quality and interoperability will be about the same of the CD, while at a €10 per album price point being a little cheaper. So you end up trading actual printed cover art for a bit of money (or a little bit more money if my assumption that you won’t be allowed to sell your iTunes purchases on eBay as you can do with your CDs), which looks like a more tempting proposition, particularly when you figure in instant gratification.

It sounds like the high quality iTunes purchases will still be in AAC format rather than MP3 format which more non-Apple players can play. I wonder whether a long term side effect of this could be that we’ll see more AAC capable players by companies other than Apple.