New iTunes and Firmware

[divad6719]

Apple have just released updates for both iTunes and the iPod firmware, updates include:

iTunes

Share Your iMix. Post and email songs in your playlists for everyone to see.
Party Shuffle.
Print CD Inserts.
Discover Music. Find out what’s playing on more than 1,000 radio stations
Previews in Playlists and Quick Links.
Automatically convert WMA to AAC. Convert the music you saved in Windows Media Player (unprotected WMA files) to AAC format.
Apple Lossless.

iPod

Compatibility with iTunes 4.5 and the iTunes Music Store
Improved playback performance
Support for the Apple Lossless Encoder, to enable compressed music encoding at high quality

What those will actually mean I have no idea, but the Lossless thing is interesting. I'm downloading them now, then it's all go for a try out.
I wonder if the new iPod firmware fixes some of the gripes ??, time will tell.

Looks like Apple's answer to WMA support is transcoding.

[pomegranate]

Gotta say, that's pretty impressive bunch of features. Now if only they'd work on the resources hog that iTunes does, I'd be well chuffed. Or maybe I could buy a new CPU...

[divad6719]

Just did a quick comparison with the Apple Lossless,
Seems to be comparable to FLAC at setting 5.

FLAC
Original WAV- 546mb
FLAC 5- 352mb

Apple lossless
Original WAV- 546mb
Lossless- 353mb

(used Coldplay's A Rush of Blood to the Head as a referance)

The files have an .m4a extension and also have mpeg4 emblazoned on the icon. So who knows ???

[winty]

Originally Posted by divad6719

The files have an .m4a extension and also have mpeg4 emblazoned on the icon. So who knows ???

Hmm, as far as I am aware, all mpeg encodings are lossy.

[seadzz]

Looks like Apple's answer to WMA support is transcoding.

Would this mean iRiver will do a AAC to WMA transcoder in their next firmware update....hope they have better things to do.

sdz

[y0da]

the whole transcodeing thing is kinda funny

it would be great if iriver supported AAC

so there would be a player where the 2 coexisted i wonder if that would some how cause a hardware failure

[pomegranate]

I thought it would be unfair after my previous post if I didn't note that iTunes 4.5 does indeed use less system resourcves than the previous version. Hurray.

[divad6719]

Other nice additions from what I can make out,

Improved battery indicator on iPod (curiously, battery life is still the same )
Ability to transfer custom EQ from iTunes to iPod
Tweaked AAC codec, I have no idea what was tweaked

Anything else I come across I'll let you know.