Like the rest of the Mac world I have upgraded to the latest release of iTunes, which includes a new pay-per-track music store. While I haven’t made any purchases yet it seems like Apple has hit the center of the target with this feature. It’s Napster only legal. In Napster’s heyday I participated and collected about 400 titles. With iTunes I can do this legally. Of course, it’d cost me $396 to duplicate my earlier collection. Hmm, this could be like the early days of AOL, when stories of massive monthly bills were common. Who’ll be the first person to rack up a 1000, 5000 or 10,000 dollar download charge in a month I wonder.
I also like the ability to collect and display the album art with iTunes 4. After doing some searching I discovered the easiest way to grab the image is drag-and-drop from Amazon. Select all the songs for an album in iTunes and then, using Safari, surf on over to Amazon and look the album up. Drag and drop the image there to the Selected Song panel. Wait while iTunes updates the tags for all selected tunes. Very slick.
Now if only the image would update to the currently playing title, rather than just showing the artwork for the selected title. Maybe there’s a preference setting somewhere that I missed.