iTunes 7: Music, video, games and more

Among the products Apple released on September 12 is a shiny new version of their popular music and video player — iTunes 7. Boasting a new user interface, improved video playback, and a new store, among other things.

Initially, you may notice some small tweaks to the appearance. For example, a reorganization of the navigation menu and has been dubbed “the source list”. The metalic appearance has been replaced with a series of grays and blues. There are also three viewing options now: the default list style, and two new ones — group by artwork and coverflow. Grouping by artwork will group together music of the same album. Coverflow allows you to cycle through album art in a cool jukebox-style browse to locate your desired album.

If you’re like me, you have a bunch of music on your computer you hardly listen to, much less recognize. A new feature brings up a notification box temporarily (think Growl) to announce the current track information. So when playing music on random shuffle you don’t have to switch back to the iTunes window to check the title and artist.

Additional functional features have been added as well. Such as a “skip count” to keep a count of how often a song is skipped over, a “Back Up to Disc” option to archive your music library, multiple libraries, reverse syncing and summary views of your iPod, and automatic retrieval of missing album art from the iTunes store.

Another big update is the iTunes Store. Now, no longer geared just toward music, but includes new sections dedicated for movies, TV shows and even iPod games! What does all this mean? Now, you can watch movies legally for as little as $9.99 and put that extra battery life offered by the new iPod videos! It seems, based on user reports, that movies take from an hour to two hours to download. Fortunately, you can begin viewing before the download has been completed. For a more indepth look at the movie download process, check out the review here.