New iTunes, new iCon

So I’m up late updating my miniature painting blog and generally reading about miniature painting. When I notice my laptop wants to update. I ignored it for a while. Then I see what it is and it is a new version of iTunes. No biggie, no need to reboot, so I let it download. It updates my library, now my iPhone, but the big news is it has a new icon.

iTunes is one of the most used Apple apps ever. The irony is on my main mac, my new PowerBook, neigh MacBook Pro, I don’t have any music. I can only sync my iPhone to one Mac and I’d rather have apps, calendar, and address book synced than music, thus I keep using my old iPod. I had high hopes for Simplify Media, who had some news of their own recently, but ultimately couldn’t get that to work quite how I wanted. I keep all my music on my old G4, which I’ve dumped too much money and time upgrading.

Even bigger news, while all this was going on and I decided to update my blog, as I’m a pretty big Apple fan, and I like to see what new features they added to iTunes. I’m listening to music naturally, on iTunes, using the iTunes DJ, choosing from one of my smart playlists, played through my NAD receiver, Paradigm speakers and using my M-Audio Transmit gadget that gave me so much grief, that is until I turned off WiFi on the G4 Tower. Now I have better sounding music but no wireless in my apartment until I finally bought a Time Capsule.

No the biggest news, is a song came on, which I really like. This song has no vocals and I got it off a compilation. I decided to promote the song, ie increase the rating. However it was already rated 4 Stars. In my system that is a ridiculously good song. Five Stars is almost mythical, it is a song that changed my life or is my favourite song by a major artist. There are literally less than 25 of them in my music collection. However I still promoted the song, because it has the funkiest flute solo of all time and it never fails to leave me feeling better.

I give you “Burning Spear” by S.O.U.L.:

So apparently the new logo was more than cosmetic as Apple also released some new products including Ping, a social network for music fans, which hasn’t been well received. Isn’t that MySpace’s niche? Speaking of MySpace, they contacted me the other day saying I could login with my Facebook ID and sync my profile, that seems like giving up. If only indy bands didn’t continue to use it, I much prefer iLike/Facebook.

Hopefully they release iTunes 10 so that my old G4 can use it, I may have to get a Mac Mini sooner rather than later to serve as my media computer, I could have bought two or three Mac Minis with all the money I’ve spent upgrading my G4 Tower. For the record my G4 is running OS 10.5.8 and I just checked for updates and am downloading iTunes 10 now. I may have to adjust my music system or wait until I get a new place, as right now it isn’t that convenient to use the G4 for anything other than background music, despite all the hardware upgrades.

Well at least this latest Apple development gives me something new to read about online, tomorrow, or tonight as it turned out. I used to be more on top of stuff like this. Time to get back into ArsTechnica, I used to think it’s RSS feed was too busy, but now I’ve gotten more clever at sorting my incoming feeds, using NewsFire.

iLike was bought by MySpace, but I never used iLike on MySpace, I used it on Facebook, now Apple wants you to ‘like’ artists on Ping. It’ll be interesting to see how this all shakes out.

Maybe I should be using Last.fm, I have an account, but I’m not sure their widget or plugin is installed on my G4, gonna have to look into that, tomorrow.

If you have thoughts on iTunes or other online music services you can leave a comment below. My G4 has been in storage for years I now listen to music on my aged MacBook Pro or in the gym on my iPhone SE. I listened to a lot of music and tracked all those “plays” on Last.fm while passing all three CFA® exams.

This entry was originaly posted on September 6th, 2010, it was last edited on April 3rd, 2019 and is filed under: Technology and tagged: Apple, iTunes, Music, MySpace.