avoid it! avoid it like the plague! do NOT upgrade your mac or pc to iTunes 7. stay with iTunes 6. if you still don’t like itunes 6, at least it works and won’t delete your music files. itunes 7 (7.0, 7.0.1, 7.0.2, etc.) is absolutely wretched. on my mac, it’s as slow as molasses, crashes and/or freezes, and if you hook an ipod or ishuffle up to it, set aside a lot of time if you want to edit your playlist - if it will connect at all. this has been happening since late september with my automatic update to 7.0 - and with all subsequent upgrades and ‘bug fixes’ up to 7.0.2, these problems remain. itunes 7 is just incredibly buggy and it’s a shame apple is using it’s customer base as beta testers. here’s a direct link to an old version of 6.0.5 for mac online (link is 19.8 megs). and here are some tips on uninstalling itunes 7 here and here.
UPDATE: followed the great instructions on the macfixitforums and the rollback to iTunes 6.0.5 worked great!
Me, i’m still on itunes 4… is there any reason to go UP to 6.0.5? If it doesn’t add spaces between tracks that would be swell.
jamie - agreed! itunes adding space between tracks is a big pain. o’reilly network talks about using the crossfade feature to minimalize this added space. also, this space-adding is reportedly fixed in itunes 7 with ‘gapless playback.’ but, as itunes 7 doesn’t work or play nice and upgrading to get the coveted gapless playback will only resort in more problems, i say wait or don’t upgrade. the big differences from 4 to 6 were better ’shuffling’ or randomizing of songs, improved search, ‘party shuffle’ feature (where you can see the next 5 to 20 upcoming songs and manage it as a real-time playlist), easier to create a podcast, and video playback and organization of videos & movie clips (.mp4, .mpg, .mpeg, & .mov only - no .avi). all in all, if it isn’t broke - don’t fix it! or rather, don’t upgrade if what you have is working fine for you and working fine on your machine. all of the recent upgrades from itunes 4 on up were not really to improve music playback but rather to match products coming out from apple (ipods, apple music store, apple videos, podcasts, audiobooks). the music playback features are basically the same. if they built in a bulk id3 tag editor into the new version, that would be nice. but yeah, wait if what you have works. here are some sites that list the a few of the differences in iTunes versions: the unofficial apple weblog and be a design group.
It amazes me that a product whose only purpose is to play music was brought to market before they figured out how to get rid of those annoying gaps between tracks. It completely destoys Jeff Wayne’s WAR OF THE WORLDS.
What have they got against “concept albums” at apple?
same thing happened to me man. i had to delete iTunes 7, rename my previous iTunes music folder “iTunes 2″, then reinstall 7 with the latest Quicktime and most other software updates to make sure i was up to date.
then, it re-add my music from “iTunes 2″ folder to the new install of 7. i had it set to copy all added files in the library to my new iTunes music folder.
(then, i just deleted them from the iTunes 2 folder.)
after all that, things worked great. i could drag & drop new files to the library. (which was my main problem previously. it kept freezing on me.) iPod connected & updated fine. the gathering of gapless playback info didn’t stall out the app with the spinning beach ball of death.
it is a buncha bullshit hurdle jumping … but it worked.
Buh? I have uninstalled iTunes on many a computer before and I never saw any loss of media files.. Yes, I am using the latest iTunes release. So. Omg. Wtf. M8.
t - sorry to hear about all of those woes! you’re not alone in the process though. i hope you got it all squared away. i am avoiding quicktime and itunes updates indefinitely and following the ‘if it isn’t broke, don’t fix it’ rule. having access to my iShuffle again using iTunes 6 is great. with iTunes 7, adding & deleting songs was a joke (not a funny one at that). anyway, hope it’s all working.
daniel - yeah, i know it sounds crazy, the loss of media files. but it does happen and is happening with iTunes 7. one thing i’ve noticed is that the media files that are purchased from the apple store (music, movies) are the ones that seem to become ‘lost’ or disappear first when iTunes 7 starts it’s buggy road to breakdown. my guess is that with iTunes 7 heavily linked to the apple music store, it corrupts those files first. regardless of my guess as to why, the problem is happening with a lot of people. this has been reported by many sources, along with iTunes 7 just running incredibly slow and creating errors with iPodsand iShuffles. but if you haven’t had any issues, that is great! you are lucky! thanks for the comments!