iTunes10: What an Improvement!

In the pleasant surprise category: iTunes10.  What an improvement!!

I like music mixes, and a three-hour drive to Vermont or a seven-hour train ride to Washington now sails by. Whether I do the mix or I leave the mix to iTunes shuffle, the results are great: good music in, good music out.

But, until iTunes 10, classical music or indeed any recordings that depended on a sequence of cuts were chancey at best.  iTunes would load album cuts in reverse order or randomly.  Try listening to, say, Beethoven’s Fifth with the movements in random order.  I spent many frustrated hours doing work arounds – most of which failed.

I was actually planning to kill the hundreds of hours of classical on my iPod. Fortunately, I didn’t. And, I’m enjoying a fine recording of Berlioz’s Requiem as I type.

There are many, many improvements in display and organization. Every new feature I’ve touched has been an improvement over iTunes9. Oddly, none of the changes I’ve liked appears in Apples list of iTunes10 features.

I have loved my iPod Classic – after the year it took me to get the hang of it. (Yeah! Yeah!! I know.) The best present my son, John, ever gave me…. I am on my second. The first still works fine after five years, but its once inconceivably large 28 gb memory proved too small. The new Classic has a number of subtle improvements I’ve noticed, especially relating to moving from menus to toggle functions.

Hail Apple! I take back the five years of nasty things I said about iTunes. And, I thank you.