iTunes 8 was released today shortly after the keynote. The mentionables are a new album art grid layout. When you click on an artist with multiple albums listed under one heading, it then goes into a list mode with the album art for each album to the left of their asscioated tracks just like previous versions of iTunes.
What’s the most notable is the Genius bar. Not to be confused with everyone’s favorite bar at the Apple Store, it sends info on your entire library to Applet to mix playlists of tracks that Apple thinks goes well together. While the keynote was ongoing I was hanging out with Bwana McCall @ Bwana.tv and he was concerned about not being able to opt-out at the onset. Well, I’m happy to say that it’s disabled by default and you do have to opt-in. Thank you Apple for not pulling another Chrome on the populace.
The only problem I had was with one particular part of the install. The installer said it was stopping all applications, then all of a sudden avast! popped up a message in the center of my screen stating that something was trying to stop avast! On-Access Protection. I guess it really was trying to stop all applications lol. It gave me a choice of whether to let it end by clicking yes, or to keep it running by clicking no. I clicked no of course. I’m not entirely sure if this is due to running Vista X64. A XP Pro SP3 x86 virtual machine I run in VMware Workstation did not exhibit this behavior with the same antivirus installed so I’m not sure why this happened in the first place. You mileage may vary.
Windows XP Pro X64 is still not supported while Vista X64 is. Again why I don’t know. XP X86 and Vista X86 is fully supported as well.
All in all, this upgrade to iTunes is working very nicely and I’m liking the grid view better then cover flow. I don’t care about ram usage, I know I got plenty of ram to start with. 
iTunes 8 from Apple is available at the following URL http://www.apple.com/itunes/download Enjoy!
Posted by John B 
