iTunes 4.5 first impression

[mmcirvin]

Now I want the Party Shuffle on my iPod. Except that making the user interface work would be an... interesting design problem, and it would probably be more complex than Apple wants the iPod UI to be.

(This is a sort of hands-on version of shuffle play, designed for lightweight DJing but also good for just listening: the next several songs in the queue are displayed, and you can manually shuffle them around or delete them before they come up to bat, or even switch the playlist from which the songs are being drawn.)

Either the Music Store is getting hammered to hell and gone, or there's something wrong with my account.

Comments

[chicken-cem.livejournal.com]

Yep, definitely Slashdotted. I've never seen it be so slow. When I was at work I couldn't connect to the Music Store at all (and not even to buy, because we really aren't allowed to do that at work, I just wanted to browse the new features).

Surely they could've invested in a few zillion more servers before rolling out 4.5. And downloading the installer was pretty darn slow, too, and we're talking T1 or T3 or whatever it is that Brown has these days.

[jwgh]

Either the Music Store is getting hammered to hell and gone, or there's something wrong with my account.

I suspect everyone downloaded the iTunes update and was all like 'Hey, what do these little arrows do?'

[ronebofh.livejournal.com]

I wonder if the point is to have people buy songs they've stolen.

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

That was my first thought too. I do think they have to refine the store search to be fuzzier. And shore up their back end to deal with the load, obviously.

My first reaction was to get rid of the arrows (you can turn them off), but As the Apple Turns pointed out that option-clicking on the arrows does a library search instead of a store search, which is kind of nice. They're still a bit too cluttery.

The ability to publish your playlist at the store is a clever viral-marketing technique. For my playlist, though, I suspect that the overlap between my library and the store's is small enough that any playlist I slammed up there would end up abridged down to something pretty monotonous.

In other news, "Au Contraire" off TMBG's "Indestructible Object" EP is the most earwormy thing John Linnell has written in ten years.

[ronebofh.livejournal.com]

Hmm, the Party Shuffle doesn't seem to work with remote tracks. What a pain.