by Adam C. Engst ace@tidbits.com reprinted from TidBITS#728

Apple recently celebrated the first anniversary of the iTunes Music Store with the release of iTunes 4.5 and a slew of new features in the iTunes Music Store itself. Although the update doesn't warrant a full version number jump, it's not at all insignificant.

New iTunes Features

Whether or not you buy music from the iTunes Music Store, iTunes 4.5 offers a number of useful new features. A new dedicated Party Shuffle playlist selects a random list of songs to play from one of your playlists (or your entire Library), but unlike simply shuffling through a normal playlist, you can see what just played, see what's coming up, change the order of songs on the fly, or add new songs. It's essentially a temporary, malleable playlist that you can modify without fear of messing something up. If you perform a fair amount of ordering and deleting songs, you can save your efforts by dragging the contents of Party Shuffle to the playlist pane to create a normal playlist with those selections.

Also highly welcome is the new capability of smart playlists to exclude the contents of other playlists. That means you could, for instance, have a smart playlist that includes all your music except for the songs in a Christmas Music playlist that might sound rather jarring in July.

iTunes has enabled users of networked Macs on the same subnet to share music for some time, and although the short-lived Internet sharing feature hasn't reappeared, multiple users of the same Mac can now share music in exactly the same way. The sharing settings look exactly the same as in earlier versions; however, as long as the user whose music is being shared is logged in, all other users who log in via Fast User Switching can play the shared music.

Amusingly, if a user called Fred is playing music in iTunes and then another user, Guido, logs in via Fast User Switching, Fred's music continues to play and Guido can't stop or control it in any way. And if Guido starts playing music in iTunes as well, the two songs play simultaneously. It's not exactly a bug, since Apple is aware of the behavior, but in my mind, Fred's music should continue to play only until Guido starts playing music in iTunes as well. In many cases, multiple accounts are used for testing or troubleshooting, and not having to restart iTunes on every user switch is welcome. But in other cases, it's truly annoying for one user to have to listen to the other's music.

For those who burn CDs, iTunes can now print song lists using a variety of templates, along with jewel case inserts that include album artwork, if available. And if you're printing a jewel case insert for a CD that contains songs from multiple albums, iTunes arranges the artwork from multiple albums in a mosaic pattern.
Lastly, to ensure the highest possible sound quality, you can rip original audio CDs using a new Apple Lossless Encoder. Its lossless compression method reduces file size by approximately 2:1 (as opposed to 10:1 or more for MP3 or AAC) without compromising quality at all. Audiophiles will undoubtedly appreciate the option to store original quality music in half the space. (Audiophiles will note that the Apple Lossless Encoder is an Apple home-brewed solution, and not based on other lossless encoding schemes such as FLAC (Free Lossless Audio Encoder).) Music encoded with the Apple Lossless Encoder is compatible with only dock-connector iPods and the iPod mini, and only then after applying the just-released iPod Update 2004-04-28.
http://flac.sourceforge.net/
http://www.apple.com/support/downloads/ipodupdate.html