iTunes 7 is with little doubt the best "new" application Apple has released in quite some time. But as early adopters (like yours truly) soon discovered, this release is a roach motel of bugs and software glitches. Some of which can be downright critical. One issue in particular struck a blow below the belt to any iPod user; after installing iTunes 7, podcasts can no longer be played back on your iPod. Any attempt to play recently downloaded podcast in your playlists results in crashing the iPod. The only workaround to this problem is to pre-play the track within iTunes on your Mac or PC. Then and only then will the audio file successfully playback without failure. Imagine having to do that with every audio file in a podcast playlist that contains nearly 50 feeds? Yeah, lots of fun that is.

Another issue I experienced deals with iTunes best new feature: Coverflow. Coverflow, for those of you that don't know, is a new way to view and interact with your music library; displaying a horizontal animated side-scrolling CD cover interface that works much like a Roldex. With this visual interface, one can navigate through their music library in much the same metaphor as a bookshelf filled with Vinyl records. After using this feature for a few weeks now I am completely hooked! I often find myself thumbing through music I haven't played in a long time or nearly forgotten about. Best of all, iTunes will grab album art for any albums you've burned off of CD. Well, most albums anyway. Coverflow is ingenious!

Unfortunately, as iTunes 7 was clearly a release that was rushed out the door, Coverflow doesn't work very well. It's slow to navigate, and more often than not CD album art fails to load in system cache without reading from disk. Scroll quickly from left to right, or vice versa, and the only music you'll hear is the sound of your hard drive crunching away as it fights like hell to keep up with Coverflow's demands. Sigh.

Thankfully Apple seems to have addressed most of these issues with the release of iTunes 7.0.1, available as of today. Coverflow is still a bit sluggish at times, but at least in a more tolerable state than before. So far I can report no problems.

Download iTunes 7.0.1 from within System Update (Mac) or click here (Windows)