Product Reviews

The release of iTunes 3 was a welcome, if unsurprising, announcement at last month's Macworld Expo New York.

iTunes 3 is not a groundbreaking release, but it contains more than enough features and improvements to make it a worthy upgrade. There are big improvements to its usability. For example, iTunes 3 now stores music by default in your Music folder, rather than the Documents folder, and, if you let it, the setup assistant will copy your existing files to it automatically.

Any songs that you add to the Library from your hard disk are now automatically copied to the Music folder, so you don't end up with tracks all over the place. You can also set iTunes to automatically rename and move the audio files on your hard disk, as determined by the contents of their ID3 tags (track name, track number, artist and so on). All these features can be turned off if you prefer to do the organising.

The most important, and extremely useful, new feature is Smart Playlists. In previous versions of iTunes, songs had to be copied and arranged in playlists manually, which could be a rather laborious process. A Smart Playlist, by contrast, automatically updates its content according to a set of simple rules. For example, you can set one up to contain your 25 favourite tracks, based on how often you listen to them. Or you can list songs by a particular artist, and when you add additional songs to the library by that artist, they will be automatically added to the playlist.

Rules are composed in a similar manner to filters in an email client. They provide a huge amount of flexibility, such as limiting a playlist to 650Mb so it will fit on a CD. Rules support new ID3 tags, such as a play counter and star ratings for songs, although we didn't have enough patience to rate every song in our library.

Check mate

Another welcome change is Sound Check, a new option in the Preferences menu. This ensures that

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all your songs play back at the same output level, regardless of the level at which they were encoded. Sound Check has to analyse every track in your library, so it can take some time, but it only has to do it once.

Another feature, which may not have universal appeal, but which we thought was great, is iTunes 3's support for audio books from Audible.com. Sign up for an Audible.com account and download competitively priced books, magazines, even excerpts from daily newspapers, and they will play back in iTunes automatically.

The system is password-protected to prevent piracy, and includes smart touches like the ability to resume playback from where you left off, even if you listen to another track in between. Audible.com's only limitation is that its content is focused on the North American market.

Sound Check, Smart Playlists and the Audible.com support will all be mimicked by the new version of the iPod, and these features will be available to existing iPod owners through a firmware update. However, this was not available for testing when going to press.

The only feature missing from iTunes 3 is support for the MPEG-4 file format. This next-generation open standard media format forms the core of Apple's recently released QuickTime 6.

One of the key features of MPEG-4 is a new audio format called Advanced Audio Coding (AAC). Apple has said that AAC will supersede MP3, as it offers better sound quality even at higher compression rates. This means you'll be able to fit more tracks on your hard disk.

iTunes can play MPEG-4 files, but as yet, it is unable to encode tracks in the AAC format. It will almost certainly form the core of the next release of iTunes, and as the product is free, we can't grumble too much.

We weren't blown away by iTunes 3, but then it's pretty hard to improve on an almost perfect product. Aside from MPEG-4 support, there are only a couple of other features we would like to see in future versions of iTunes. The ability to customise the interface would be nice (SoundJam, the product iTunes is based on, supported skins), but we're unlikely to see this any time soon.

While iTunes can download track lists from the Internet when you insert a CD, some music player software also downloads the album's cover art. This would be a welcome addition.

Apart from these small gripes, it would be hard to call iTunes 3 anything other than a must-have upgrade. After all, it's the best MP3 player on the Mac, it just got better and it's free.