iTunes 4.9: Flop.

Okay, the initial razzle dazzle has worn off; color me unimpressed. In fact, color me annoyed. As an Apple aficionado, I've become well accustomed to my love-hate relationship with Apple. They hook me with one feature only to screw me with another.

With iTunes 4.9, the hook is show notes on the iPod. I've gotten comments from people asking about a specific song at a specific point in the show that I didn't identify in a timely fashion. With the latest software, you can hit your select button 3 times and voila! the show notes appear on your screen as you listen. That way you can know instantly that the soundbed after the presidential rant is in fact Rantings of Eva. Instant information. Hawt.

A close second in the cool features list is the automatic conversion of all podcasts to bookmarkable-MP3. Bookmarkable files are a watershed for us longer, ramblier podcasters.

And chapters? A close third. I myself don't know that I'll ever avail myself of chapters, as it's sometimes hard for even me to distinguish one ramble from the next. But in the case of something like The Sounds in my Head, well, as Daniel said, if he's playing something you don't like -- skippity skip. Very handy.

But the major, massive, critical flaw is the way the iPod defaults to listing all your podcasts by artists; unlike your Genre or Playlist menus in the regular music library, there is no option for "All." Thus, each day, if you want to know who's released a new podcast while you slept, you have to select each and every fucking single subscription individually and see if you've already heard all the episodes in there.

iPodderX already gave me the ability to convert all my incoming podcasts to bookmarkable AAC format on the fly. It also allowed me to specify custom playlists for new shows to be uploaded to. I had mine sending some to "Podcasts - News," some to "Podcasts - Music" and some to "Podcasts - Variety." Each of those playlists was sorted in iTunes (and thus on my iPod) by date: oldest first, so I made sure to plow through them in order.

And since all of these files were in my Library, I could also create a smart playlist of any file with the Genre=Podcast (set in iPodderX if it wasn't so already), Date Added = within 2 weeks, and My Rating = 0 stars (thanks to a tip I picked up via Podcrawl -- once you listen to a cast, rate it, and it drops off the New Podcast list at next sync). All of this various sort-by-date action made it very easy for me to tell when I had something new to listen to. In this ridiculous separate Source for all podcasts in iTunes, it's fucking impossible. What retards. YOU SEE, PEOPLE? You see what a good idea it is to have major corporations to barge in and say they know what they're doing? Adam Curry, if you didn't see this massive design flaw coming, you're just as dumb as you fucking look. You should have been screaming at the top of your lungs. But you're too busy getting stoned. Dumbass.

I'm pretty sure I'll be going back to iPodderX within days. I miss the flexibility and control. For those of you who really, really want show notes on your iPod, then iTunes is the thing for you. But for now, to me, that ain't worth it.