My Perspective of iTunes 7

I’ve seen some people upset about their recent “upgrade” (they’d call it something else) to iTunes 7.  There have been problems with iTunes purchased music not making it’s way over, music not playing correctly, and other stuff like that.  I’ve also read that Apple is granting a one time allowance to re-download lost content that was lost due to the upgrade.  In my opinion, that means that Apple can easily recognize and admit it’s mistake and make it right all in a short amount of time.  We know it’s a short amount of time because this version was just released on Tuesday.
I have seen a number of features that I really like about the new version 7.

1. You can force iTunes to update album art to the iTunes version, even if you didn’t purchase the album through iTunes.  It takes a while to do it the first time, but I added a Peter Frampton mp3 album this afternoon,  and iTunes went out and got the album art immediately.  I am highly impressed by this as I have gone through a lot of trouble in previous versions updating each album by going out to Google, searching for the album cover and picking the best one before adding it.  Streamlining my own process without even having to ask for it… “cool”!
2. I like the visual representation of how much space I’m using on the hard drive.  It shows how much is music, video, etc.  Part of the presentation also includes tabs for the iPod preferences that used to require a right-click to access.  Again, making things easier is tremendous.
3. Built-in ability to back-up entire library (excluding Audible purchases) to CD or DVD easily and restore that library later on, if necessary.  I’m always concerned that I don’t have a duplicate copy of my music just in case of hard drive crashes.  I used to work in hard drive data recovery, if you didn’t know that already.  Data recovery is expensive.
4. It’s pretty.  The previous version was pretty, too, but looking at this makes me feel all fuzzy inside.  I almost feel the need to get a mac to enjoy the entire Apple experience.
5. Download progress page.  It consolidates all downloads on one page, so you can see how far along each is and also pauses downloads when the connection drops.  I’ve tested it, and it seems to work flawlessly.  You can also pause a download purposely as well.  In previous versions you could only see progress of downloads in the top area, and even then, I couldn’t figure out how to switch progress bars between two things that were being downloaded.
6. Skip Count allows you to see how many times you’ve skipped a song.  This is helpful if your library is larger than you iPod, and could potentially make it easier to determine which songs you want on it.  I have a video now, but had a Nano before, and this feature would have been great back then.

I have seen some people complain about iTunes using up way too much memory on their system, but that hasn’t been as widespread as the music complaints.  I’ve played quite a few things that I got from the iTunes store, as well as stuff from my personal library and haven’t had the sketchy audio quality others have complained about.
My personal experience leads me to the conclusion that iTunes 7 is better than it’s predecessor.