I like it!
Well, I’ve updated iTunes as well as the iPod software and gapless playback works as advertised. The cover browser is nice, but seems to me more of a gimmick than anything else. I do like the new album-oriented view, where the tracks on the same album are listed with the artwork. I also couldn’t resist getting Texas Hold’em for my iPod.
I’m just excited about the album artwork. Too bad it doesn’t download track info like MediaPlayer.
Kinda, yeah. I’ve renamed some albums to a format I prefer (ie “Grese: Original Motion Picture Soundtrack” is different from “Grease: Original Broadway Cast Recording”) and that seems to kill finding any art.
Your album probably has to be set up exactly as it is in the iTunes catalogue.
If they plan to advance this feature I’d like to see a right-click (or option-click?) option in the iTunes store for “Send this art to my iTunes”; from there I can choose which album to associate with the art.
Question about the ‘remember playback position’ flag: If I have an album set to remember the playback position and I leave then come back, will it remember my playback position in relation to the entire album, or just the track?
Let’s say I’m listening to The Beatles’ Abbey Road. I get to the 1:10 mark of Because when I decide to stop playback and listen to something else. When I go back to Abbey Road later will iPod jump me to the 1:10 mark of *Because *when I select the Abbey Road album, or do I have to remember I was listening to *Because * and select that particular song to jump back to my bookmark at 1:10?
I ask because I listen to MP3 books sometimes and I’d really like to just select the book by title to jump back to my bookmarked spot rather than remember I was on “Chapter 12”.
anyone determine if you can update the software on your ipod without necessarily updating the tracks? I don’t want to experiment; I might lose several thousand songs.
I updated my iPod software & iTunes and didn’t lose a thing. I don’t have anything setup to synch automatically though, so ymmv.
Honestly, and it’s none of my business really, but *why *do you keep songs on your iPod but delete them off your HDD? Bigger drives are really cheap these days, and it would seem to me you’re just *asking *to lose stuff eventually.
my library is growing fast now with the addition of movies so I’m going upgrade my HDD to 250GB or so. That’s $68 (after $10 rebate) at New Egg. If you can afford an iPod, how can you not save up $70 for a hard drive to save your music? That’s less than a lot of Apple’s accessories.
Whatever floats your boat, I guess.
The one thing that is irritating me about the new version is that I can’t move it around in my start menu. If I move the iTunes or Apple Software Updater folders (I group programs into music, hardware, games, and so on) then upon running either Windows attempts to repair the installation and restores the original start menu settings.
I have been completely unable to resist ordering one of the new ultra-small iPod Shuffles, mind you. I love my current model - I don’t miss the screen at all - and the new clip version will be particularly handy for travelling to work.
I know, right? Why clamor for bread when you can eat cake?
I can’t afford to upgrade my computer right now (I might have to sell my iPod, which was a gift, to keep my electricity on), so the only way I can use my iPod’s capacity is to use my 37g hard drive as little more than a conduit to my 30g iPod.
Soon’s I finish getting laid off from my job next week and find another one, I’ll upgrade my computer.
Ah, understood. Times can suck like that. I’ve been there, that’s for sure.
There’s your problem! 
For any fence-sitters - the update to v. 7 is painless and gapless playback works exactly as advertised, even on albums that were mastered by lunatics - Mike Oldfield’s* Tubular Bells II *could well have been performed straight through with no breaks, and someone later said “Hey, we need to split this up” and some of the track breaks are almost arbitrary. Before gapless playback, the breaks were noxious. Now, they’re gone.
When you fire up iTunes the first time, it will immediately launch into analyzing your tracks for gapless playback.
As for the cover art - nifty, but we need a way to access the art database so we can go out and find the art for any mis-spelled or otherwise unfindable albums. It seems unlikely that they don’t have the art for say, South Park - Chef Aid, and for reasons unknown, about half of the tracks from Moulin Rouge Vol 2 got the right art and the other half didn’t get any art.
K so I did it. Stomach clenched in panic while it updated my iPod; was I losing 4,000 songs?
No, I didn’t lose the songs. And my playback is now gapless. But it’s not seamless; there is a distinct point where one track becomes the next, although there’s no longer a fraction of silence. Just an annoying kind of click artifact. So I’m looking forward to version 8.
Haven’t detected click on gapless playback. Did you also update your iPod software?
Yes. As I said, the gap is now gone, but there is a distinct “seam.”
Ok. The problem now is that since I can now see the album cover art, I feel compelled to have the entire album, not just the tracks I like :mad:
My iPod started randomly displaying the wrong cover art. Which was sometimes funny; Marilyn Manson cover art while listening to Ella Fitzgerald is its own kind of entertaining. But it seemed useless and memory-sucking, so I deleted all my cover art. If I ever get a bigger harddrive and can go back to sync’ed iTunes/iPod, maybe I’ll download it all again.
It sounds like it’s determining the amount of silence within each track and skipping past that. I guess they still haven’t done anything to address the pause between tracks being played.
The click doesn’t occur between distinct tracks; only with blended tracks. In other words, it’s probably not a click at all, just a timing glitch. When I’m listening to an album where one track fades into the next, at the point were there used to be a gap in the older version, there is now a “seam.” It feels like a click, but that’s not quite accurate.
I suspect I’m getting it, where the rest of you are not, because my iPod is not synched to my iTunes. I only have about 12 gigs of free space on my hard drive, so I can’t keep all 30 gigs of my iPod library on it.
So, when I installed the new version yesterday, the first thing it did (as noted above), was process all ~1,000 songs in my iTunes library for gapless playback. I suspect this means that it’s incapable of simply leaving the gap out; that it must “learn” each album’s specifica gap pattern, or whatever. It did not do this when I updated my iPod. So I suspect that if my iTunes library matched my iPod library, all the “learning” the new version did vis-a-vis the gaps, was only “learned” for those ~1,000 tracks on my harddrive. The remaining ~4,000 tracks on my iPod must, therefore, playback with some kind of standard, default gapless period, rather than the “learned” transition of the iTunes ~1,000. This default (goes my theory) doesn’t quite match up with the transitions on the albums whereon I’ve noticed this “seam.”
That’s my theory.
Oh and I just parsed what AA said, above me. Yes, that’s got to be it; that’s what the process of “learning” must entail; determining the amount of silence at the beginning or end of the track.
This strikes me as retarded. Why can’t it just play a grouping of songs–a CD–as a CD player would? with whatever gap or transition the source had?
There’s gotta be a reason for this. Otherwise, like I said, it would be retarded.
I hear absolutely no pause or gap or click or anything like that when I play gapless tracks. I think lissener’s theory about not having his iPod sync’d to iTunes is correct.
I’ve got mine sync’d, and I get the small click. This is specifically with techno mixes that are gapless on the CD. There is a definite click between tracks. I’m going to re-rip one of my techno CD’s to fix it. But I have noticed the click on all my gapless stuff.
Yes, I did iTunes 7, and upgraded my Ipod to 1.2. This is the 60GB model.