Even though I am trying to make the move from Windows to Linux I am still interested in the happenings at Apple. Even though I disagree with Apple's philosophies on dealing with copy protection, and online music/tv/movie distribution, I still feel that they are pushing the envelope in user interface design with some of thier OS and some of thier applications. With that in mind when I saw that ITunes 7 had been release I went to download it right away.

Seeing as I no longer use the ITunes Store, due to aversion to DRM'd content, this review will be based more on my impressions of the actual applications design and performance.

Appearance

Overall ITunes got a subtle face lift from its previous version. When the application first starts up you are greeted with a familer interface. The main change I noticed was a move away from the shiney glass look of aqua, to a more subdued flat look. The new color scheme reminds be a lot of Web 2.0 color schemes, more subtle shades and less contrast of colors. This is a much better look overall, also due to its less stylized theme it blends in much better with both the Windows and MacOSX environments.

The next thing you will notice is the addition of headers to the left sidebar that breaks it up into more manageable sections. There are sections for you music library, the iTunes Store, devices, and playlists. This is a pretty obvious next step which is already in quite a few other players. It should have been like this from the start. It always looked a little cluttered in previous versions having all the items just crammed into the sidebar.

Features

Cover Flow is probably the biggest new feature. It is basically a virtual CD rack where you can flick through all your CD covers and pick a disc to listen to. At first I thought this was pretty gimmicky and I could not see myself using it much. However after a week I find that I am using that view nearly exclusively now. I find that it is much easier to recognize the cover art of your favorite CD than it is to find the name of it. When you have a list of hundreds or thousands of songs it can take a while to zero in on the one you want. Cover Flow allows you to quickly skim your collection and find the album you are looking for.

The other feature I noticed was the iPod summary view. It gives a nice breakdown of how your iPods capacity is being used, and provides easy access to options controlling how iTunes interacts with your iPod. Nothing ground breaking, just a nice usability feature.

That was about it, if you are not interested in using the iTunes music store there really are not that many new features for you. This update, like many updates in the past, is aimed mainly at supporting new features in the iTunes store, in this case it's support for movies.

Performance

iTunes has always been known as a memory hog, and iTunes 7 takes this to a whole new level. When I was playing with the cover flow feature my memory usage hit nearly 170MB's. During normal use in list mode it went down to around 120MB's. That is 50MB's more than Firefox which was recently slammed for it's memory usage (which was actually an optional page caching feature), and three times more than OpenOffice writer which I am using to write this review. On my system this kind of memory usage is not a problem, hell that's why I bought a lot of RAM is so I can use these hogs. But for a lower end system with only 512MB's of memory, like a lot of default Dell and Apple configurations, it can really affect your systems performance.

CPU usage is also high when using the new Cover Flow feature, but seemed comparable to iTunes 6 when just playing music. Seeing as you only really use the Cover Flow view when you are directly interacting with iTunes it probably does not matter if it eats up extra CPU cycles. A few exceptions might be if you are playing games in windowed mode and browsing your music collection.

Overall though I would have to say that the application feels more responsive than version 6. Even though it uses more resources, I found that it seemed more responsive where it matters, in the user interface. In version 6 checking for new podcasts used to bring my system to a standstill until it was done. Now iTunes does a much better job of staggering the podcasts so that it only checks three or four at a time, and does not attempt to hit all fifty at once.

Scrolling large lists of music or podcasts is also much smoother than before, and switching from one view to another is quite a bit snappier. This boost in perceived performance is probably due in part to the increase in system memory usage.

Final Thoughts

iTunes 7 is a pretty minor update from version 6, most of the changes are all in the Store. The actual application has only seen minor feature updates, and performance improvements. If you are iTunes user then I would say it is a worthwhile update. So far I have had no problems with it, and it seems to run quite a bit more smoothly than prior versions, even if it does use more resources.

The new look is also a minor improvement, but it is still an improvement. The color scheme and theme fits in with the look of windows much better than version 6, and I looks better in OSX too.

All of the minor improvements are not enough to keep me as a user though. Over the years I have made an big effort to stay DRM free by only buying a few songs from iTunes, and the rest on CD. Now I am free to change my main player and operating system whenever I like.

Even though iTunes has a few decent improvements the idea of one huge application that does it all does not appeal to me. It goes back to the old days of the Mozilla browser, when they had a huge application that did everything from browsing, to web development, to chat, to e-mail, when all you wanted to do was browse the web. This is the same thing when I want to listen to music I do not want to have to load a huge app that can rip/burn CD's, download podcasts, buy music online, sync my portable device, play TV shows, and everything else iTunes does. In the end I just want a small player that allows me play and organize my music.

This is even more important when it comes to music, because the music player is not the only or even the main application you have running on your system. You normally always have your music playing in the background when you work or play on something else. So the last thing you want for that background program to be a huge beast.

If you like using iTunes or a just forced to because you have a investment in their DRM'd music and proprietary music players then 7 is a decent upgrade for you. But if you prefer simpler more efficient applications, then iTunes 7 just adds more bloat to an already obese application and does not really provide any new features that justify its huge size.