I downloaded and installed iTunes 8 for my PC and my MacBook, and it’s fine — it’s still got the same clean interface, still organizes and plays my music, and still syncs with my iPod, so it’s everything I really need it to be.
Most of the new and modified features are of little interest to me, but the Genius Sidebar option is a little freaky. In addition to making “smart” playlists of similar music, it sends users’ information to the iTunes store so it can more specifically target marketing efforts based on an individual’s listening habits. I’m not down with sharing my usage data with big companies. I know, plenty of big companies have plenty of information on me already, and more to the point, I have a Last FM account, which is public and essentially generates the same kind of data, so I shouldn’t really complain. But I’ve come to terms with how easy it is to access people’s personal information in the internet era; and my Last FM shit isn’t tied to a global marketing machine (yet — it is, after all, owned by Yahoo) and I control what info gets published to Last FM’s machine.
Ultimately, the payoff for trading my personal info for musical suggestions isn’t worth it. I’m always interested in the kinds of technology and services that offer music (or books or clothing) based on existing usage or previous purchasing data, but I’m rarely impressed by their results. Suggestions made by these kinds of interfaces are almost always totally not of interest to me (the science behind it just isn’t intuitive enough to handle the job; I’d rather use Pandora, anyway). And frankly I’m also starting to get really sick of being marketed to ALL THE TIME.
Which brings me to my only other real iTunes 8 gripe: those little iTunes Store direct-link arrow buttons next to the data in each of the fields of an iTunes playlist. Used to be a little option in the General Preferences panel to turn those off, and now the store has to be disabled entirely in the Parental Control Preferences panel for those links to go away (which, incidentally, also disables the Genius Sidebar). That sucks. Every single aspect of listening to music does not have to be about buying more music.
I’m happy to have the store enabled, and I use it sometimes, but those damn arrows have to go. I’m simply not interested in being reminded every time I look at iTunes that I can instantly buy more music from that artist, album or genre. Not to mention the skewed logic in having those links next to existing music, specifically in the Name and Album columns — I already own those songs and albums, why would I buy ‘em again?
Luckily, this issue has been raised in the iTunes forums. Not that I expect Apple to do anything about it — seriously though, how much trouble would it be to reintroduce that option to the General Preferences panel? — but you’ll see in that thread that there are work-arounds to get rid of the arrows in both Mac and PC formats, though they involve some code-monkeying. Which also kinda sucks, but it gets the job done.