All three iTunes machines in our house have now been updated to the new iTunes 7 with somewhat mixed results.

Summary

1. No installation problems
2. Slow performance until gapless playback scanning is complete
3. Coverflow makes iTunes much more album oriented
4. You can assign almost anything as artwork
5. iTunes 7 Mac still runs just great on a PowerPC G4 (Pentium III class)
6. iTunes 7 PC is a dog on Pentium 4 2 GigHz (Slow, skips when playing)

Installation

On my G4 Powerbook iTunes installed flawlessly and initially came straight up with no problems. After starting however, I kept seeing iTunes trying to scan my library to identify songs for gapless playback. During this scanning the machine was unresponsive, and because my 2437 song 23Gig music library is stored on a slow USB linked laptop drive, the process took a long time. Eventually, I gave up trying to use the machine and just left it to do its thing. Once this process completes, it should not bother you again.

Albums and Coverflow

The next issue was with my library. Because I have so many separate single songs, sessions etc., which end up grouped into one-song ‘albums’, the coverflow feature is rendered pointless. The remedy is to very carefully, go through the library and group songs where appropriate and assign artwork.

One of the most fun things with iTunes 7 is the coverflow feature. iTunes has a new view that shows a 3d sliding image of album covers which is utterly successful in recreating that feeling of flipping through a bunch of LPs looking for something cool to put on. The side effect of this is that since starting using iTunes 7, I’ve been listening to entire albums again. Of course, you better have a bunch of good albums!

Mac Good, PC Bad (iTunes)

Now to the bad news. On my wife’s Dell Pentium 4 PC, iTunes installed just fine, as on the Macs, but unlike the Macs, it just hasn’t settled down. It looks the same, but with any activity on the PC, or even clicking within the iTunes window, the song playing will start skipping and sometimes just won’t stop.

I tried increasing the buffer size, with no real positive effect. I also quit most of the other running processes such as skype, gotomypc, vnc etc., and no improvement.

Final Words

So in summary, I say there aren’t too many issue with the Mac version of iTunes, but you should give the upgrade very serious thought if you are running on a PC. We went from having iTunes 6 run flawlessly on the PC, to having the slow skippy iTunes 7.

Note that none of these criticisms apply to the Mac version which is still great, even on a G4 laptop.