iTunes 7 Released
by Doug Anger, Technology Columnist

Last week, Apple released version 7 of its free music software iTunes for Windows and Mac OS X.
Prior to last Tuesday, iTunes has had the ability to play music, audio books, select TV shows available from the iTunes music store, and Internet radio streams. Music was importable from audio CDs, files on your computer, and Apples iTunes Music Store, which also served as a central distribution point for freely available podcasts. Because of an agreement between Apple and Audible.com iTunes also plays audio books purchased from Audible.com and can subscribe to Audible accounts. Music can also be shared over a network. iTunes can also help you organize your music by downloading information about each track from the Internet.
The interface of iTunes 7 is somewhat more polished than in previous versions, abandoning the former brushed metal motif for a sleeker, glassy look. The library is now divided into the mutually exclusive categories of music, movies, audio books, podcasts, TV shows and contains links to Internet radio stations.
There are also new viewing options: you can flip through your albums on the computer as you would in real life or display your songs, TV shows, and audio books by album with the album cover displayed along side the list of tracks. This latter display is useful in keeping things sorted, but the flip-through mode becomes unwieldy if you have more than a few albums.
New in iTunes 7, you can now buy movies from the iTunes music store. Movies are priced at $9.99 and $12.99. Downloaded movies are playable directly from your computer at near DVD-quality. (Previous versions of iTunes only supported low resolution video.) Unfortunately, these video files typically require more than a gigabyte of space on your hard drive, making them resource-expensive on older machines and eliminating the possibility of downloading them over all but the fastest of Internet connections.
If you have a new iPod, you can also buy games for it from the iTunes Music Store, but these are not playable in iTunes.
NOTE: All content purchased from the iTunes Music Store (and Audible.com) is protected by Digital Rights Management (DRM) technology to restrict the number of computers you can play it on. This means that you cannot play that content in programs other than iTunes. Audio can be exported to a CD and re-imported to another computer or program (although the legality of this is questionable). Video, however, cannot be exported into any format not protected by the DRM. To the average user, this means that any videos bought in iTunes stay in iTunes.
iTunes is not the only free music player. Although there are many alternatives, Banshee (http://banshee-project.org/) stands out for its compatibility with iTunes music sharing and similar graphical interface.

iTunes 7 can be downloaded from http://www.iTunes.com/.
