iTunes 7 review

The addition of movies to the iTunes Store in the US and the addition of games such as Pac Man and Tetris to the iTunes Music Stores worldwide may be the headline-grabbing features in iTunes 7, but Apple has also made several additions to the application itself.

The most significant of these is called Cover Flow, a technology developed by Steel Skies and bought by Apple. Cover Flow allows you to download cover art for albums in your iTunes Library and display it while a track is playing. You can also flip through album covers visually, as if you were flipping through a record collection.

There are a couple of caveats. First, Cover Flow uses the album name in your iTunes Library to figure out what it should download. If an album name is misspelled, wrong or missing, it won't download anything. Second, if you have albums in your Library that aren't available on the iTunes Store, the display area will be filled with a beamed quaver. So, if you've diligently ripped your entire collection of Now! albums, the digitised tracks will be sans cover art.

Cover Flow also occasionally failed to download art and we had to do it manually by right-clicking the track and selecting the appropriate contextual menu item. It also made mistakes, displaying The Killers' Hot Fuss cover for a track by The Vines, for example. You then need to clear the cover art manually, which involves hunting around in menus to find the right command. Cover Flow is slick and looks impressive, but most of us don't have an iTunes Library full of songs available on the Store, so there will be large gaps when flicking through tracks. We can't help but feel it's a gimmick.

One new feature that's definitely not gimmicky is the new Gapless Audio tool. You can now play albums recorded without gaps between tracks as they were intended to be heard. Even better, albums already imported will have the gaps removed. So if you're desperate to listen to Dark Side of the Moon in iTunes the way that Waters, Gilmour, Mason and Wright intended, you now can.

You can also now reverse-sync iTunes downloads. This means that if you download tracks on one Mac and sync them with your iPod, then connect the iPod to another Mac, you can upload the tracks from the iPod to the second Mac, provided it's in the group that's authorised on your iTunes account. Sadly, it only works for iTunes downloads, not ripped CDs or tracks acquired from other sources.

The new Download Manager allows you to specify the order in which content from iTunes is to be downloaded, and the iPod Summary presents a colour graphical representation of your iPod's contents.

There have been a couple of tweaks to the interface. The iTunes Mini Store, Equaliser and Visualiser buttons have been removed form the bottom of the iTunes window, and can now only be accessed from the View menu or via a keyboard shortcut. This makes dismissing the Mini Store less easy than previously, and is a retrogade step. The Browse button now sits alongside the Eject button, which also doubles as the Burn button.

The Source list has been revamped and is now better organised, and there are three View buttons: one for the regular text listing, one for a text listing that displays a thumbnail of the cover art, and the full-blown Cover Flow view, which animates album cover art as you browse the Library.

iTunes 7 is a solid upgrade. Cover Flow has its faults, and we're perplexed about the gradual creep of the Mini Store, which is now less easy to get rid of. However, as a way of organising, downloading and playing music, podcasts and movies, it's superb and, of course, free.