Yesterday’s Apple announcement brought a handful of new toys for us to play with: new iPods (both in capacity and features, though no radical changes), movies for download, but especially a new version of iTunes with substantial interface changes. From the program’s icon to its display of songs, from the Source list (no longer labeled as such) to new navigation displays, iTunes 7 probably contains the biggest changes this program has seen in years.First, the interface. Apple simplified, smoothed, honed and tightened up the overall interface. With new, more modern buttons and icons, and especially a new Source list. This has sections labeled Library (for your content: music, movies, podcasts, etc.), Store (for the iTunes Store–note the new name), Devices (your iPod, when it’s connected, or CDs, when you insert them in your computer’s drive), and Playlists.

The biggest change, however, is the three different views available for viewing music files. The first, list view, is what iTunes offered before. The second is a “list view by album”, with the album art at the left, and the tracks listed in order. Finally, CoverFlow is the new “flipping album cover” view. This is very cool, and very efficient, if you have whole albums and album art. (iTunes will search for album art, if you have an iTunes Store account, and will look for art for your collection and download art while ripping CDs.) This is a radical new way of viewing your music, turning what was previously lines of text into visual reminders. You can use any of these three views in your library, but also when viewing playlists; and you can use a different view for playlists, your library, or the Party Shuffle. Any playlist can have any view, allowing you to choose according to what’s in the playlist.

You can still use the column browser in any playlist, or to view your library. Personally, I find this much easier to use when viewing my library, because I have, well, about 13,000 songs in each of two libraries, and the browser lets you view by genre, then artist, then album. But you can combine the browser with either of the list or album views, which is a big improvement.

In order to make this album art view useful, iTunes now can download art for your music files (if you have an iTunes Store account). This will happen when you first run iTunes 7, or when you import new songs from CDs. This is not perfect, though, since the album name must be exactly the same as that on the server Apple is getting the art from. But I’ve found it to be relativey accurate (in other words, it finds most of what I throw at it).

But there’s more. There are some interesting enhancements that are less obvious. First, if you’re playing something in your library, and switch to look at a playlist, you can come back to your library at the same location, seeing the same thing (such as an individual album). Previously, you would have to reselect that album to return to it; this is a nice change, since I’ll often be listening to an album, then want to make a change to a playlist, only to come back and have to search again.

Another big change is gapless playback. If your a fan of classical music, or of live music such as the Grateful Dead or other jambands, you’ll know how annoying that half-second gap was between songs. You could more or less eliminate it by turning on Crossfade Playback, but it wasn’t perfect. Now, you can simply tell iTunes that a specific album is gapless (select the album’s track, select File > Get Info, then select Yes in the Gapless Album section at the bottom of the Info window). If you have the latest iPod, or a 5G (video) iPod, it will play gapless as well; making the iPod the only current music player with this ability.

Apple has also realized that they need to prompt people to back up their music. They do this now when you download music from the iTunes Store, but there is also a backup function available from the File menu (Back Up to Disc), which asks what you want to back up, then makes the copies, prompting you for new CDs or DVDs as necessary.

Some features will only be apparent if you use the iTunes Store (formerly the iTunes Music Store). The display and organization of the store are different, and when you purchase anything, a “download manager” displays the progress of your downloads, and can download multiple items simultaneously. Also, if you download a video, TV show or movie, you can start watching it as soon as the download begins; you won’t have to wait a half-hour or more to download a movie (if you watch it on your computer).

iTunes is now not only the nerve center for your media content, but it is also the total controller for your iPod. When you connect your iPod, you’ll see the iTunes window change to show the iPod, with tabs for the different preferences. At the bottom of the window, you’ll see a graphical display, with different colors, showing what type of content and how much is on your iPod. But best of all, you can update your iPod directly from within iTunes. I assume that, in the future, iTunes itself will be able to download iPod Updaters. This makes not only updates easier, but also puts the Restore function right in front of users’ eyes (see the iPod / iTunes FAQ for more on restoring your iPod as a troubleshooting technique).

Another new feature is the ability to transfer music to and from your iPod. Before you think you can copy all your music, read on… You can only copy music purchased from the iTunes Store, and only to and from machines that are authorized for your account. In practice, I’m not sure how this will work; if I want to copy music to, say, my son’s iMac, I want to copy what I’ve ripped from CDs as well, so this is very limited. However, it does mean that new purchases are easier to copy to other machines.

Apple has added a few new tags for music files, usable in smart playlists and in displays. One interesting tag is Skip Count (and Last Skipped), which records when you’ve skipped over a song either in shuffle mode or even when playing an album. This is a good way to find which songs you don’t listen to, and eventually uncheck them so you don’t sync them to your iPod.

All in all, this is a major upgrade to iTunes, and is quite impressive. Apple has spent a lot of time thinking out the interface, has responded to a major feature request (gapless playback) and has slickened the program considerably. Get used to new ways of working with iTunes, and get that new iPod!