iTunes 8.0 (part 1)

Well, I was going to hold off on this a while – especially after reading some of the bad press on the web – but I cracked.   Yeah, I wanted to play with the Genius thing, I admit it.  According to reports, iTunes 8 and Vista might not play nice.  Very not nice.  There’s commentary all over the web, including the Apple message boards, about obscure – apparently HP related – software conflicts that cause BSOD crashes in Vista when you plug in an iPod.  I’m on XP, which is why I’m risking it, and for reference, no crashes and iTunes did find the iPods when they were plugged in.

First thing about the installation is it behaves – mostly.  The installer gives you the option of leaving automatic updates and the like off, and seems to preserve your options, although you will need to go into the XP Software Installer and turn Quicktime’s autorun off again - like you always have to.   The installer didn’t crash.  It didn’t take too long.  Everything else went fine.  No nightmare scenarios.

Don’t assume that, though. Back up your library files (in your user profile, iTunes Music Library or similar .xml and .itl) and your preference file (in your user profile, Application Data/Apple Computer/Itunes/iTunesPrefs.xml)

Second thing is some of the options have moved.  If lost, Google will provide the answer, though in short, the import options are now on the General tab, and the backup and export options are on a submenu called Library on the File menu.  Settings appear to be preserved across the upgrade, as are the logged-in and authorisation status on your iTunes store account – I seem to remember the last upgrade didn’t and you needed to reauthorise the computer, which meant remembering to ask your partner for her password again, which was a bit tiresome.

When you start iTunes it’ll spend a while checking album art.  This seems to be converting the existing art for the new grid view, not redownloading.  Don’t panic – it isn’t copying over the corrections you already made.  After that its done, although if you turn on the genius function (which you are obviously nagged to do), it then spends a long time analysing your library.  The genius thing obviously sends data to Apple.  If you care about privacy blah blah – although if you’re worried you should probably care more about Google than Apple.

When Genius has done its thing, the last little piece of housekeeping is to turn those annoying arrow things that point to the store back off.  They get turned on by default, and the option to turn them off is disabled.  Odd, since these seem especially redundant in light of the genius function.

To get rid of these, on a PC, close iTunes and open your prefs file in a proper text editor (not notepad, a programmer’s editor like EditPad Lite).  This is in your XP user profile, in Application Data/Apple Computer/Itunes/iTunesPrefs.xml.  This file should look odd, full of blocks of As and things.  Search for User Preferences and go to the place in the file that looks like:

<key>User Preferences</key>
<dict>

Beneath that add the text:

<key>show-store-arrow-links</key>
<data>
AA==
</data>

On a mac, open your terminal and do:

defaults write com.apple.iTunes show-store-arrow-links -bool FALSE

Be aware that apparently on a Mac, in iTunes 7, you could swap functionality between these arrows linking to the store and to your local library, a functionality which has gone in iTunes 8.  Something to consider before you upgrade if that sounds appealing.  In a similar vein, the other missing option is turning off the genre list in the browser view.  I don’t, but people seem to be missing this.

On a mac, in the terminal, do:

defaults write com.apple.itunes show-genre-when-browsing -bool FALSE

On a PC, add the following below the text you just added above, same place in the file:

<key>show-genre-when-browsing</key>
<data>
AA==
</data>

Both of these with thanks to Rodalpho.

Back to Genius.  I’m writing this while iTunes does its analysis thing.  Its been forty minutes and it looks to be two-thirds complete.  I’ll post this now and leave it to it, then make some comments about Genius tomorrow.

WHAT I’M LISTENING TO: All India Radio (mentioned yesterday). Downtempo trip-hop, reminiscent of Portishead, especially the album The Fall.  Although since Portishead don’t like being called trip-hop, maybe these guys don’t either, but its hard to explain without using the words, if you see what I mean.