Y’all must have better hearing than me, because I can’t hear anything!
I’ve noticed the album name problem when downloading cover art, too. If I bought music from some online source other than the iTunes Store (gasp) the name is often slightly different, and iTunes won’t find album art.
Prior to 7.0, I didn’t really notice which songs had album art and which ones didn’t. Now that it’s so obvious, I spent several hours last night trying to find art for the more obscure stuff. I had five tabs open (Google image search, Amazon.com, Wikipedia, a private trade site, and AllOfMP3.com). There were still some I couldn’t find, and I just plugged in a picture of the performer(s) or composer.
By the way, I noticed a change in behavior. It used to be that in normal view, the album art for a song (or the “drag artwork here” notice) would appear whenever I selected the song. Now it doesn’t show up unless I play the song. Can that be changed? I can’t find a setting for it.
Above the album art, the title bar say “Now Playing”. To the left is a little rightward pointing arrow. Click on that and the title bar will change to “Selected Item”. Voila!
This behavior was already present in the previous version. You must have either changed it without noticing, or the upgrade reverted your setting.
Re: the debate about gapless playback: According to the Apple support site, “Gapless playback is always on in iTunes 7 or later unless the Crossfade feature is turned on. If Crossfade is on, only audio files that have the “Part of a gapless album” option checked and are capable of being played gaplessly will play with no gaps.”
and
"iPod does not support crossfade playback and only some iPod models support gapless playback. For those models that do, all files that support gapless playback are played gaplessly whether or not the “Part of a gapless album” option is checked.
Supported iPod models:
* iPod nano (Second Generation)
* Fifth Generation iPod
* Fifth Generation iPod (Late 2006)"
Bummer for me, I have Fourth Generation. So I don’t hear an audible click, but there’s still a second’s worth of silence in between tracks. However, that silence goes away in iTunes (even if I’m playing songs from my iPod on iTunes), as advertised.
The album cover art flipbook is sweet (originally this was mac only) but I would be much nicer if I could get it fullscreen. Currently, I can only make it so big, but the rest of the ITunes interface is still there. Black screen with album covers scrolling jus tlike on a mac please!
Confirmed! All tracks are gapless even without “Part of a gapless album” being set. This is on both iTunes and iPod. And I still don’t hear any click or pause between tracks. Everything is seamless.
If you don’t like the way iTunes looks up artwork and you’re on a Mac, check out this. It will look up the artwork and if it’s the one you want, you can add it to the song or all songs on the album with a couple of clicks.
Have they added Lyrics to list of things that can be searched through?
No, I’m sure they would have announced that. Am I the only one who thinks the new Itunes for Macs is ugly and hard to read?
All these enhancements has convinced me to get an iPod. Has it been released in the stores yet?
You don’t need to get iTunes in the store. You can download it free from iTunes - Apple
It’s because there’s more than one thing causing gaps. Assuming you’re using MP3s, there’s probably a bit of padding encoded right into the track, in addition to whatever gaps your iPod used to add. It’s to do with the encoding algorithm; to accurately break down the track into the frequency encodings MP3s use, the encoder needs a bit of blank space at either end. Modern formats like Ogg compensate for this by adding tags that let the player know precisely where the “real” start and end of the track are. MP3 doesn’t have any such standard tag.
What you’re probably discovering is that even though iTunes is now not adding any gaps of its own, your MP3s have a bit of silence at each end anyway, which iTunes treats as part of the regular track (as it should; it has no way to tell this from “genuine” ripped silence). Here’s a link with more info (written before the iTunes update, and with a slightly anti-iPod slant, but the technical info is sound). There’s a couple of samples you can play to see if this is the effect you’re getting. Basically it sounds like the limitation is now your ripped files; you can either re-encode them with a newer encoder (I don’t know which to recommend), or accept that it’s a bit better than it was, and live with the clicks. I also can’t guarantee that re-encoding will help, since the tags necessary to eliminate the encoded silence from MP3s are non-standard, and I don’t know if the iPod is supporting those.
Wiki link if you’re really bored and want to get into the technical stuff. 
And I do mean really bored…
My previous tests, where I couldn’t detect any clicks between tracks, were all from music bought on iTunes. I’ve now tested on tracks I ripped myself, using the iTunes default settings (128 kbps AAC), and the tracks are still seamless. I would presume that whatever algorithm Apple is using to remove the gaps is optimized for that.
Sorry, I didn’t mean the new iTunes. I was wondering about the 80GB iPod.
I’ve only seen the new Nano here. The guy I talked to said that the 80 GB iPod as well as the smaller Shuffle would only arrive in October. However, gapless playback will work with all 5th generation iPods, including the 30 GB and 60 GB models you can already find in stores.
I can’t imagine how that would ever be possible.
I am a bit confused about what the “generations” of iPods are. I have an iPod I got about 2 years ago, it’s a 40GB model with a scroll wheel but is not in color and has the same dock connector as the current Nanos and whatnot have. The serial number on the back is “JQ439M1NPQ7”.
What “generation” is it, and will it be upgradable to gapless playback? (If not, I wonder why not?)
I’ve held off upgrading to iTunes 6 (or 7) to be able to continue to use JHymn to remove the DRM from stuff I buy through iTunes (I have non-Apple MP3 devices in my car and on my home network that only work off of MP3), which doesn’t work with iTunes 6 or later. If it gets rid of the gapless playback problem though I am willing to take the sour with the sweet.
Yeah the new iTunes by the way? It sucks. It seems really unstable. And now all of a sudden it plays all songs with this horrendous amount of screaching noise. And I know its not a problem with the computer because all songs play fine in Winamp or Media Player.
Sounds like you have 4th generation iPod, in which case it won’t support gapless playback:
http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=61688
I’d read that the new iTunes was having some problems with Windows. Hopefully it’ll be fixed soon.