With the release of iTunes 7 last night I was excited as I clicked the update button late last night. So, off my updater toddled and all was well…. that is until this morning. My iTunes libary is mainly a referenece of just links not tracks to my portable hard drive and not directly on my mac. Whether this was the reason for the odd behaviour or not remains to be seen. It upgraded and it did it’s mojo “Determining gapless : playback information” for each track in my libary. All seeemed good and after a minor grump about no albums turning up and figuring it was cos the tracks were on my portable hard drive, I went to bed not unhappy.
This morning was a different matter. I got up early in need of some tunes and promptly kicked iTunes on. As soon as I did I was greated with “not enough memory” as an error box. Oh joy and eh? So, 1 gig of memory is not enough to run iTunes… interesting does Apple have some memory deal going on or a stock pile they need to get rid of? I hadn’t done the QuickTime 7 update so figured could be that also and pottered off and got that. Now, this time when I reinstalled iTunes apart from the QuickTime update having been on I also had my portable hard drive linked up and the “Determinging gapless” could analyze real tracks. After a reboot it worked and proceeeded to suck my memory like some vampire whilst analyzing. It appears on a G4 powerbook that 1 gig is just not enough now if you like to listen to music.
All in all the iTunes update leaves a bit of a bitter taste in my mouth. I was so happy that they brought Coverflow as I’ve been loving it long time on my set up myself. The integration though leaves a lot to be desired and the getting artwork seems to be taking hours and is shall we say erractic. I am thinking the hard work I did copying and pasting to get my application version of Coverflow working is now going to have to take place again… Apple says go back to the start and rinse and repeat then. I have noticed one big flaw in that there are many double entries on the artwork which means a fair bit of editing once the marathon getting of artwork is done. Does Apple think I have nothing better to do or something?
It does make the sceptic in me think that Apple is trying to push people to their higher end machines and ignoring one of the basic rules of software engineering - always support the lowest denomenator in your range. We’d all love a intel supped up machine… but we all can’t afford one right now thanks and in the meantime wouldn’t mind listening to music on our powerbooks or machines that actually aren’t even over a year old yet and we did bother to put 1 gig memory in to make sure it worked. Mutter. Yes, I am sure it will iron out but it’s all a bit putting off really.
Josh
I have a PowerMac G4 1.25 GHz with 1.25 GB of Ram, which is fairly similar to your Powerbook although yes, I do have a bit more memory than you. I was concerned about the performance of iTunes with Coverflow, but it really works great. It’s very fluid, loads quickly and I don’t notice any memory problems.