iTunes 4.7¶
365 words on iTunes
Another update to iTunes. Only a decimal digit one but an update nonetheless. Apart from presumably including support for the photo iPod, this one has an extra or two for the rest of us as well. That’s probably good news as it hints that Apple still tries to improve iTunes for the existing users.
iPod Preferences
The first change is tiny but in my opinion important. The iPod preferences are now part of the application preferences. No more wondering where these are. Clicking the iPod button in the iTunes window now just opens this preference pane. Perhaps that original button will even vanish in the next version of iTunes, making the application look less cluttered?
After this moderately positive note, let me add that even after years of ‘enjoying’ OSX, I still find that those toolbar-esque things look ridiculous with all their items of varying width. And in iTunes’ preference window I can’t even turn off the text labels (not that I’d know what the icons represent without the text…).
Floating Mini Player
Next, in the list of new features is something which I’ve seen people ask for quite a few times: The ability of the minimised iTunes window to float above all other windows. While I personally probably won’t use that option, there are certainly people who will. You’ll find it at the bottom of the right-most pane of the preferences. I couldn’t find any AppleScript support for turning this feature on and off, sadly. I might have enjoyed that.
Find Duplicates
iTunes now has a command to find duplicates in its library. That’s nice to have with increasingly large and chaotic libraries. And it can be found in the Edit menu My first impression, though, is that it may not be good enough for the task it claims to do. It seems to find duplicates by looking at their tags. That probably means it won’t find duplicates in untagged or wrongly tagged files. And it loves listing all those live or special versions you may have of songs.
Patches
My patch against iTunes metal windows and for more subtle ‘arrow’ icons still works in iTunes 4.7, btw. It just needs to be reapplied.
