I have purchased a new iPod. Thanks to that $1K winnings from the mansion risk-free bet, I decided that I needed a new iPod. My previous (and first) one has now reached the point where its battery doesn't last a full day's worth of writing-my-thesis time. Between that and Tuesday's announcement of the new 80 GB iPod, I just had to purchase one.

So yesterday I placed my order for a brand new 80 GB black iPod with custom engraving provided for no extra cost. It should ship early next week and be in my hot little hands in about 2 weeks total. Hooray!

Yesterday, I was playing with my music library in iTunes 7. The new iTunes has some pretty nice features two of which I like a whole lot. The first is automatic downloading of album art. This is such a cool feature that now I needed to double check *all* my album tags to make sure that they all have the correct album and also add the album art for all the songs that iTunes couldn't find the art for. I think I made it up to 'D' in my library before I had to head out for the night. It's gonna take me awhile to get through my library! The other feature I really really like is one called "gapless playback". This automatically does a scan of your library and makes sure it knows if two tracks should be played with no gaps. I don't know how the software works, but it is damn cool. No more gap between the Rhapsody songs "Epicus Furor" and "Emerald Sword"!

What I don't like? iTunes 7 seems to have broken the scroll wheel functionality ... at least on my windows computer. No longer can I scroll down my list of songs with my mouse scroll wheel. Since I've gotten so used to doing it, this is really really annoying for me and I really hope they fix it soon. Also, they've managed to make iTunes take even more memory which is annoying because yesterday I found it running with over 70 MB of memory. Why does it take up that much? It's just a music player! Worse yet, for the first time ever, iTunes' playback was crackling when I was doing something else on the computer. It wasn't even something all that intensive... just opening up new tabs in firefox!

Ugh. So I hope they fix these issues soon - the release is quite nice and I'm pretty happy with some of the new features. I just hope they have these issues fixed before I get too annoyed with it.

Heraldk