Has anyone else dl'd and used this yet? It's awesome! For the audiofile in me, the gapless playback is probably my biggest wish since i started listening to most music digitally.
but for my aesthetic sensibilities, apple hit another home run. they made iTunes cleaner, better organized, and it downloads cover art for you automatically. this in itself would be minor, except that they've also offered two new ways to view your music collection, both of which integrate the album artwork in a much better way than has been done previously. One of them actually looks like an old school jukebox!
this is pretty cool, and one more step torwards the death of the cd, for better or worse.

I just declined the new version DL when it asked me.

Yeah, I got it last night at home. I'll probably d/l it at work, too, a little later.

It's really nice. First thing it did was automatically d/l artwork for the few albums I actually purchased from iTunes. They're really big, too, probably big enough to make a nice print-out for a CD.

edit: Oh, and the jukebox thing is cool, too. You can actually scroll through your library by clicking on pictures. Makes me want to track down album art for everything I've got in my library.

It's iTunes 7? I can't find the link to download it on this page. http://www.apple.com/itunes/download/

yes, it's iTunes 7, if you go the apple main page you should find a link there

Yeah, it just takes me to the link I posted. Then nothing. What's the dealy-yo, yo?

when i go to that link i see iTunes 7. maybe you just need to refresh

What an update. The interface for your ipod is sweet... although, I ain't spending no $5 for Pac-Man!

For cover art, it'll download ones I think that it finds to be the closest match. So, if you have some OOP CD's on there, you might be best served nabbing iTunes Catalog instead.

I spent 3 hours doing this when I got an ipod video.

So when it says it will send info to Apple regarding files with missing artwork when you use the "find artwork" feature....could this be a bad thing? Say if one were to have files that came from possibly not so legal sources?

right after it says that, it also states that it doesn't store any information about your library, and i can't imagine how it would be able to speculate whether your mp3's were legal or not. if you're worried about apple snooping, just turn off the recomendations feature

First thing I did. And yes, the new layout is freaking sweet.

if you have os10.4 you can get a widget called "amazon art" that searches amazon.com for the album art and can automatically apply it to an entire album on itunes for you with one click. it's pretty sweet.

i dont use itunes (other than to put music on my ipod) because i think its bloatware. but, i gotta admit, its a damn good piece of bloatware.

Yeah, I see iTunes 7 also. But on that page, there's no download link.

and there's a new ipod, 80gig. i'm still waiting for 200 gig, but that probably won't happen by the time i'm in the market for a new mp3 player (this coming april).

I could see this taking me days.

Edit: and unless someone give me a video ipod or 80gb model for Christmas, I'm just going to keep my Sandisk 2gb model, and continue using Winamp for mp3's and Windows Explorer to move files. I love that.

I will admit that iTunes is great for changing large numbers of ID3 tag information at once.

Does Winamp have a plug-in for cover art display?

I still use mediamonkey...it grabs art, track info and blurbs from amazon in a bout 10 seconds for an entire album. saves it to the file as well, so as not to clutter up folders with extra .jpg files, etc.

damn, i wonder if my it dept will update our itunes for us.

so wait, what does this do to the layout of the ipod now? I downloaded the new itunes this a.m. before work and will mess w/ it when i get home. I have a 60g video ipod and already have a lot of album covers downloaded. what is the main layout change for the ipod?

Also, i haven't downloaded new ipod software updates because the last time I did that it killed my first ipod. I assume i should do it again, eh?

i will say that I am a sucker for the album art.

Yeah, this will be the first update I do with my new ipod, so *fingers crossed*. The album art thing will be handy, as well as the gapless play.

There, I finally found an active link to download this sumbitch. I can't wait to see that jukebox-lookin' feature.

here are 2 potentially dumb questions:

1) i have a pc for work. if I do the ipod update here will there be any problems when I use it primarily on my home mac?

2) on my mac at home, I think i permanently turned off the reminder for the ipod update. I checked itunes help, and it said to update the ipod, go to itunes--->check for updates, and then nothing really happened. am i doing something wrong?

i guess i could have just explored more and read this part on the itunes site:

Software spot

iTunes makes it one-click easy to update the software on your iPod. The iPod summary page features a built-in software version tracker and updater. If you’re software’s out of date, click once to update it. You can even restore your iPod to its original settings with one click.