It seems like only yesterday we were downloading version 5 of iTunes and here comes luck number 7. This release has a new look and feel, support for movies and some neat browsing additions.

New Look

iTunes 7 gets a bumped up new look and feel this time which seems to be a progression of clean design. The new side navigation now sports Music, Movies, TV Shows, Podcasts and Radio but breaks out the Store menu with iTunes Store and the familiar Purchased smart album. The buttons and window are now a darker gray and some tabs have a simpler look of white forefront , darker blue background. There is some similarities to the OS 9 graphite look. Old is new again.

Art Conversion

When you first start up the new iTunes 7 after installing it it will ask you if you want iTunes to automatically get your cover art for you when you import new music. This is a long awaited feature which has been handled well but not perfectly by third part solutions. There are two ways to get album art for your ripped music. The first is automatic as you import any new CD and the second is in a contextual menu which grabs it from Apple's online library. Both ways are very nice additions.

Cover Flow

Apple has been known to take a good idea presented by a third party application (Watson, Widgets, etc) and make it their own. This time the luck winner was Cover flow which was bought by Apple and incorporated into iTunes 7. Good job Apple. The functionality is great and gives the user the ability to flip through album covers using a horizontal scroll bar. This has also been brought into the iTMS (iTunes Music/Movie Store) in the video section.

Another new album view shows you the album artwork on the left hand side and the songs presented on in a list down the right hand side. This comes from Apple's online store and is another great addition.

One More Thing

iTunes 7 has a lot of features to go over but here are a list of some of the other little things that caught our eye in the early morning lab test.

• iTunes now counts skipped tracks and can be seen in the Party Shuffle configuration.
• iPod games are now available in the store. We will review this later when we get our new 80GB iPod video test model.
• Apple now supports gapless playback on the 5th & 6th generation iPods
• Movies and TV shows are now sold in 640 x 480 sizes for better quality.
• You can now sync iPods to multiple computers as long as they are authorized.
• The icon is now blue. Yeah!

More reviews to come as the iPod Tips labs are expecting the shipments of a 80GB iPod Video next week and a new iPod shuffle in October. We will be reviewing the iPods, games, movies and anything else we can get our hands on.

Apple iTunes (www.apple.com)