iTunes 8 Available for Download Now, We Test It Out [ITunes]

September 9 2008, 6:37pm

iTunes 8, complete with fancy Genius Playlists and grid view, just went live via Apple Software Update and on Apple.com. Go grab it if you're interested, and let us know how the fancy playlists work out for you. Hit the jump for our initial impressions and a gallery of screenshots. First impression: this thing takes FOREVER to install and requires a restart. I want those 20 minutes of my life back, Apple. This is a media player for god's sake. Second impression: it's eating all of my system resources going through my 120GB of music for Genius Playlists. This had better be worth it. It's using over 300MB of my system memory and it appears that it's going to take a good hour to handle this. You've been warned. Grid view is pretty useless as far as I'm concerned. It makes sorting through your music collection next to impossible if it's even sort of large, and when you click an album to play it you can't see the album's tracklist. Couple that with the fact that half my albums don't have art attached and you have a feature I'm guaranteed to never use. The new visualizer is AWESOME. I love it. Is this a bug? The icon that goes next to whatever song is playing in list view doesn't seem to appear anymore. If I'm looking at a list of songs, the only way to see which is playing is to look at the top window and then find that title in the list. That's no good. Nevermind, it's back now. Not sure what the hell was going on there. Update: about 40% into this Genius business. It's sloooowwwww. [Apple]

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