Magnetosphere revisited (audio by Tosca) from flight404 on Vimeo.
Today was one of those Apple days. Not in a major way, but still interesting enough to warrant taking a peek at a few blogs that were live-blogging Apple’s “Let’s Rock” event, featuring Steve Jobs, of course.
This was a music event. A new Nano and a new Touch were launched and other products were updated. Interesting, but not for me at the moment. In fact my first generation iPod Nano lays in disuse in my bag. I hardly listen to any music nowadays. I’ve pretty much given up on podcasts. I play the occasional song or podcast from my Nokia N95. I only use the iPod when traveling (certain songs now trigger memories of early morning arrivals at various airports).
Anyway..
One of the announcements today was iTunes 8, which received quite a facelift.
The first thing I checked out was the new Magnetosphere visualizer. I spent around 30 minutes just staring at my screen while various Linkin Park tracks played. Amazing! Galactic bodies and black holes interact in a captivating way in this new visualizer which Apple recently acquired from an independent developer.
Tomorrow I want to see this visualizer on our offices 46 inch LCD TV.
I wanted to check out the most important new feature on iTunes 8: Genius. Steve Jobs went on and on about this. It’s basically an “intelligent” automatic playlist engines (and a suggestion engine) that supposedly creates playlists of songs that go well together.
Genius is, apparently, a web service that uses collective knowledge gathered anonymously from iTunes users to suggest things to you. But DAMN! It needs an iTunes account.
For some dumb reasons, we, in Jordan, are outside the iTunes-o-sphere. Lebanon, Qatar and other Arab countries already are iTunes enabled. Why not Jordan boggles my mind.
So I could not try the Genius. I was left with looking at the visualizer instead.
Comments
9 responses to “ITunes 8: stunning visualizer (but no Genius for Jordan)”
It works on my UK store account
I got a a U.S iTunes account, tried Genius!
Although we have an iTunes store here in Lebanon genius is not available… and this pretty much sucks because i really wanted to try it and it looks pretty cool… on the bright side you are getting the iPhone soon be happy about that i don’t think the iPhone will ever land here… at least legally ofcourse
That’s not a problem at all!
You can simply make an iTunes free account
oooohhh the power of google
http://www.google.jo/search?hl=en&q=iTunes+free+account&btnG=Google+Search&meta=
I didn’t try it yet…I have an unlocked iPhone and I’m not quite sure if iTunes 8 would break something (BTW you need an itunes account to install apps on the iPhone ver 2.0)
I meant I didn’t try iTunes version 8…I already have an iTunes account
Don’t worry about it. Genius is cool but just not that cool.
Wow, I’d watch the visualizer. Your title is absolutely correct.
ITunes 8: stunning visualizer (but no Genius for Jordan)…
ITunes 8 received facelift especially in Magnetosphere visualizer. Impressive and Innovative….
It’s absurd how Apple is calling this visualize thingy a “feature”, a major feature even! Seriously how really listen to music why staring at the screen for some visualization!?
iTunes is terrible on Windows, it takes 5 times more to load than WMP, it’s barely catching up with WMP features introduced since years…
I’m disappointed by Apple, I was waiting for some real improvements in this version since I’m forced to use iTunes for iPod.
The two softwares I used for Apple on Windows so far is iTunes and Safari and both are horrible, which is one of the reason why I’m hestiant to get a Mac and get stuck with any software developed by Apple, their OS X for example, they didn’t show that they know what they’re doing so far for me.