iTunes—it's the yin and yang of our modern, media-enriched lives. It's Apple's recommended software for managing some mighty fine iPods and iPhones, but it has also become a resource beast on both Windows and Mac. Toss in the fact that it has been lagging a little in feature innovation—especially when it comes to managing a library and discovering new music—in recent years, and these 0.0.x updates get just a little more... discouraging.
Not content to let all hope be lost, however, the inescapable Kevin Rose has returned from his anonymous source factory to shine a light at the end of the media management tunnel. Posted on his personal blog, Rose says he has details on some key features coming up in iTunes 8 to compliment the iPod nano rumors he busted out nearly two weeks ago.
For fans of music relational systems like the ill-fated Pandora, iTunes 8 is said to include a "Genius" feature that can build playlists from "songs in your library that go great together." Genius will also include a Genius Sidebar, which really sounds like just a refreshing of the MiniStore already included in iTunes. We aren't sure whether the Genius Sidebar will use smarter technology to recommend iTunes Store music that is truly like the music in your library or the currently playing song.
Another major new feature is the arrival of HD for TV shows, and Rose says customers will be able to download HD content to iTunes. This is very interesting when you consider the current state of HD in the iTunes Store, as only a small collection of movies are currently offered in 720p HD, and even then, only for the Apple TV.
If you're already burned out on the fancy Cover Flow mode for flipping through your artists and albums, Rose says a new Grid view is coming. It isn't hard to imagine what this will look like, but we certainly hope this new view isn't limited to just music. Lastly, a new music visualizer is also said to be on the way. Apparently, people still use music visualizers in iTunes.
All of these features sound like reasonable bets for what's actually coming in iTunes 8, but we certainly hope they aren't the only ones. iTunes could really use some trimming of the fat, and we would love to see music organization features that are much more friendly to homes that have media on more than one computer (PCs and Macs alike). Heck, we'd be happy if iTunes 8 gained the not-so-modern ability to watch a folder for new media; say, a folder sitting on a centralized home server so that all computers could access it.
The one thing we aren't betting on is seeing iTunes 8 introduced on September 9. Call it a hunch, or call it something else, but we don't plan on waking up Software Update just yet.
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