iTunes 7 rocks my world!

Apple has just announced iTunes 7.0, a new version of their popular iTunes jukebox software. Along with this comes an iPod firmware update. Just another update, you hear? No siree. Apple have finally added a feature that I have been wanting since I've had an iPod.

Gapless playback.

Yes, you read that right. Apple have finally fixed the gapless playback (segue) issue.

I've ranted about this in a previous post, and that was before I even purchased an iPod. In fact, it was one of the things which was deterring me from buying an iPod. Eventually I caved and got one, but it has always annoyed me. So much so, that I tended to avoid listening to albums like Dark side of the moon and Abbey road on my iPod because they just didn't reflect the experience of listening to the same albums on CD. I was always hoping that Apple would listen to their customers, and in this case they have and I'm very happy.

I'm happy they have implemented it, but I'm extra happy because they did it so goddamn elegantly. While initial reports (from various sources) indicated that I would have to manually go through my collection and tag the albums/tracks which require gapless playback, iTunes did all the hard yards for me. After upgrading, it ran a quick analysis over my 50GB+ library and automatically figured out which sequences of tracks require gapless playback. A quick iPod sync later, and I was listening to the awesome medley on Abbey Road as nature intended it. For the first time on my iPod, Mean Mr. Mustard and Polythene Pam were characters in the same story, not separate ones with gaps.

Niiiice! (those extra i's are in honour of Apple, who I am very happy with at the moment).

In an ironic twist, I was listening to Brian Wilson's SMiLE album just yesterday. This is an album where each track is a chapter in a complete work, with segues galore. I was holding off on listening to it because I knew it wouldn't be very good on the iPod. Now I can listen to it again just like Brian Wilson wants me to :)

FYI, the next item on my iTunes wishlist is the ability to perform AND or OR operations on playlists, on the iPod. For example, let's say I have these 2 playlists:

Party mix
Tracks I haven't played in 2 weeks

I want to be able to AND these playlists, so I can hear all party mix songs that I haven't played in 2 weeks. At the moment, I have to create another playlist in iTunes just for this purpose. But I want to be able to do this from the iPod, so I can do it at home (and not from iTunes, which is on my work computer).