iTimes with Tony Bove

With Macworld Expo in San Francisco approaching, the rumor mill is working overtime along with developers feverishly constructing demos and beta versions of new applications.

The new iTunes Plus portion of the online iTunes Store is now available, offering higher-priced, higher-quality, DRM-free songs and albums you can play on any device and copy endlessly. And as of one day after it was announced, boomers rule.

Yahoo is set to unveil the Web’s largest legally licensed database of accurate lyrics. While you can find lyrics on other Web sites, many of those sites are technically breaking copyright law and may also be inaccurate.

So you want to upgrade EMI-labeled music you purchased from iTunes to the higher-sonic-quality versions without copy protection (when they become available in iTunes next month)? If you’re a Mac user, you can use this tip. Otherwise, watch this space for future enhancements to iTunes.

Apple has taken a sad song — the copy restrictions on its music — and made it better by removing the Digital Rights Management (DRM) protection for its high-quality music format in a deal with record giant EMI.

Apple TV is a hardware node of the iTunes platform, but it is capable of much more than its current features — Apple can extend the feature set pretty easily through updates to
the onboard software. Apple TV works with PCs and Macs transparently, taking advantage of whatever broadband connection you have — and giving it an edge over traditional VOD services and the XBox 360.

iTunes version 7.1.1 addresses stability issues and minor compatibility problems. Must have been that wobble in one of the wheels. Some Windows Vista problems have been fixed, but not all. See my overview of iTunes version 7.1.1. features for a blow-by-blow description of cover browsing, managing multiple libraries, and using other new features of iTunes 7.1.1.

So far there have been no reports of trouble with the iTunes 7.1 update. People are mostly thrilled by the full-screen CoverFlow feature for browsing by album covers. But iTunes 7.1 is truly welcome in one corner of the universe — folks who use MusicMatch Jukebox.

Apple this week released iTunes 7.1 for Mac and Windows. Besides providing support for the new Apple TV product, it now offers a new full screen Cover Flow and improved sorting options to let you decide how iTunes should sort your favorite artists, albums, and songs. Apple also released QuickTime 7.1.5 which delivers numerous bug fixes and addresses critical security issues.

Several YouTube videos describe in detail some of the iPhone demonstrations Steve Jobs gave at the Macworld Expo keynote speech in January.