iTunes 7 turning out to have major glitches

When we were deep inside Maestro Jobs' reality distortion field on Tuesday, all these new additions to iTunes 7 seemed like significant improvements over its previous version. But not quite 48 hours later, all is not quiet on the iTunes front. Specifically, users on Apple's web forums and our own tipsters are reporting that some new nanos aren't being recognized in Windows iTunes 7, music being played through iTunes 7 sounds "scratchy" at times, CoverFlow doesn't always entirely download properly, and there are allegations that iTunes 7 has become, slow, bloated, and a resource hog. Some of us here at Engadget who have installed iTunes 7 haven't noticed any bad playback or other slowdowns, but have been dissappointed that very few of the albums on our machines have successfully downloaded album art. Furthermore, The Sydney Morning Herald called iTunes 7 a "lemon" yesterday and went on to report that: "Both Mac and PC users appear to be affected by the glitches being reported, and numerous different threads on the Apple discussion forum have described a range of technical issues." Oh, and did we mention that many professionally produced podcasts -- including CNET's Buzz Oud Loud, Popular Mechanics, and our own -- are reportedly not working. If Apple doesn't do something about this pretty soon, people might start calling it iCan't -- as in: "I can't play my music anymore."

[Thanks to everyone who sent this in]

Read - The Sydney Morning Herald
Read - Apple iTunes Forums
Read - Possible solution for nano issue in Windows
Read - Podcasts are broken
Read - Roku SoundBridge iTunes support broken (workaround here)

[Gordy @ Sep 14th 2006 10:36AM]

Hmm, it's a good thing I backed up 6 before I installed it, but I haven't had any problems on my G4 933.

[Alex @ Sep 14th 2006 10:37AM]

HAHAHAHA.

is it just me that thought this post sounded really really funny? or am i just in a good mood.

anyhow..

i used to use iTunes. then by iPod died...

so no music for me :-(

but im thinking of investing on the new 80GB model.

thats all for me.

thank you.

[Binome @ Sep 14th 2006 10:37AM]

i'm running itunes 7 and have noticed no problems

[Henry @ Sep 14th 2006 10:38AM]

It's working fine for me, I'm still getting podcasts and it could find plenty of my album art.

[Gamey McGee @ Sep 14th 2006 10:39AM]

No problems whatsoever. Using it on 3 computers since release. 2 macs and 1 pc.

[pog @ Sep 14th 2006 10:41AM]

Have it running on 3 different Macs (G4, G5 and Intel)and with 3g and 4g iPods and its been flawless, although I agree the album art fetch is a bit tempremental.

Can't comment on the Windows version, but all in all I'm extremely happy with this upgrade personally.

[Jeff James @ Sep 14th 2006 10:41AM]

I installed it and noticed all the issues you mentioned (except the nano issue). Not running it anymore.

[kalmbach @ Sep 14th 2006 10:41AM]

I've had (still having) playback problems with earlier versions as well. It's strange they don't give you the option to select which souncard/output you want to use. Also, there are no buffer/driver settings.

I turned to Winamp instead. And you know what? Even though Winamp has the functionality, I don't need it. Because it simply works =)

[Eddy @ Sep 14th 2006 10:41AM]

Not yet upgraded. So far I read many forums that there is no problem at all.

[rmjb @ Sep 14th 2006 10:41AM]

Reading this post was surreal, it sounds like a MS product release.

- rmjb

[rasbill @ Sep 14th 2006 10:41AM]

deep down i knew it was dumb to spend money on itunes then just download with bittorrent, now i cannot get itunes7 to even open never mind have any of these other problems with it

[Edward Black @ May 7th 2008 4:41PM]

did you manage to find a solution to the problem of opeming v 7

[andrew @ Sep 14th 2006 10:41AM]

mine works great no problems unlike wmp 11

[aboriginal @ Sep 14th 2006 10:42AM]

Yup, have the scratchy tracks, but the most annoying is the "album art". Didn't auto add Gnarls Barkely and I can't batch add to the whole album - I have to add the art one track at a time. What's worse is that iTunes has chosen covers and changed art that was already in place - and different art in flip mode than the album in the second mode and I can't change that out. MacBook Pro 17 running here.

[Rick @ Sep 14th 2006 10:42AM]

No problems. Quite like it, actually.

[Little Joe @ Sep 14th 2006 10:42AM]

Ive had the cover art download issues.

Other than that, no other technical issues.

I does suck though that you can drag and drop your own album art onto the album and album art views.

[David @ Sep 14th 2006 10:43AM]

It's CoverFLOW, not Flip. CoverFlip sounds like a Microsoft ripoff.

[Brandon @ Sep 14th 2006 10:44AM]

I'm running iTunes 7 on a 24" iMac, a MacBook, and a Powerbook. I noticed that the Powerbook needed some time to download cover art and time to process gapless playback. Over a few hours of playing it ran a lot smoother. Of course it runs faster on the faster machines but even on a machine a couple years old it seems to run fine. Intially it did not download album art but I ran get album artwork from the advanced menu and it downloads more and more each time it scans. I also tried it in the RC release of Vista without any problems. I think once it updates the library and downloads the new album art content it runs much better.

[Dave @ Sep 14th 2006 10:44AM]

Yeah, Mac Mini here... spent about an hour last night farting around with Google Image search to begin filling the gaping album artwork hole. I was enjoying myself though, so I'm not pissed or anything. There are larger problems at stake in the world than this, I think.

As for Podcasts I admit that I don't regularly listen to them... I work in A/V and can't listen to anything but my own crap all day. Yes, my crap sounds brown. It is the smelliest sound you ever saw.

[Matt @ Sep 14th 2006 10:44AM]

I haven't had one issue, yet, with iTunes 7. I play alot of Podcasts and no issues there. Music plays just fine, no "scratchiness" as reported. Movies and TV shows play smoothly.

[David @ Sep 14th 2006 10:44AM]

Yeah, I've been frustrated by these bugs on an otherwise very healthy computer (Windows). The program likes to recreate its start menu and desktop icons with each launch if you decide to move its shortcut folder from its original start menu location. If I plug in my nano, browse its music library and customize my choice of displayed columns and their order, it forgets the customization the next time I plug the nano back into the very same computer. Finally, highlighting a group of tracks on the same album and dragging album art over fails to assign this art to the album. At most, only the first track receives the art unless you manually add the art to each via the Get Info menu option.

[F_N @ Sep 14th 2006 10:45AM]

It works pretty good for me (and I like it)!

Except: if you have more than one album called "Greatest Hits" (for example) - it gets confused. Even when you manually change all songs to the new art, it still appears as what it thought it was before on the left. Annoying, but it's the only thing I noticed. It also automatically burns a CD when you put it in (haven't found how you stop that yet)...

[Mr. Tips @ Sep 14th 2006 10:46AM]

People, please, have some consideration. This isn't a time for your success stories. As we learned from the Herald article, this software RUINED SOMEONE'S LIFE! It should be pulled immediately! Maybe we can start an online petition about this.

[mikeR @ Sep 14th 2006 10:46AM]

iTunes 7 has been working wonderfully for me. Video playback is a million times better, and it feels a heckuva lot sprightlier than iTunes 6.

Sounds like a load of BS to me.

[Ashley Allen @ Sep 14th 2006 10:46AM]

Coverflow is a great idea but iTunes can't seem to find the album art for stuff I can easily find on the music store!

How long to Zune?

[131172 @ Sep 14th 2006 10:46AM]

I have experienced "scratchy" songs once in a while and I thought it was due to my speaker. I smell 7.01

[Jason @ Sep 14th 2006 10:46AM]

Only installed it on my PC at work. It's VERY slow. It freezes up all the time. I have maybe 5% album covers. Gappless playback takes HOURS to get set up for only about 2000 songs.

But that's just my experience

[Chris @ Sep 14th 2006 10:47AM]

Had Issues with the scratchy playback, on Windows. Also, it's a huge resource hog. Loaded it up, clicked play, got the scratchy noise, checked my Task Manager, 100mb of memory allocated, with 100+mb going to swap.

Windows sucks, this I know, but damm, it's like a 50% memory usage increase from iTunes 6.0.5.

Reverted back until somethings get fixed.

[Mike Smeen @ Sep 14th 2006 10:47AM]

iTunes 7 will only mount my original 5G iPod on first boot. After I eject it, I have to reboot in order for it to pick it up. Windows mounts it as a drive just fine, though.

Other than that, I'm not noticing any issues. But that's a pretty damn big issue!

[G @ Sep 14th 2006 10:47AM]

I was also having problems with the podcasts from Cnet and Engadget, all the others seem to be working just fine. Someone suggested on the Cnet forums to play the podcasts on iTunes for a couple of seconds and that after sincronyzing with the iPod it will play the podcasts properly. Well, I did that and it worked, at least for the Cnet podcasts, I can't tell for the Engadget one since I didn't had the chance to try it.

[PN @ Sep 14th 2006 10:48AM]

I put my nano in disk mode and it worked just like that.....restored it.....left it on the dock......just fine

[Chris @ Sep 14th 2006 10:48AM]

Anyone else notice this is coming out on the same day that the zune is releasing info LOL cant be good...

I have to agree im getting a fair bit of laggy feeling from my itunes when browsing through songs, and a few of my songs have shown that "scratchy sound" when playing but it seems to be quite random at which songs its affecting i really dont understand it... besides the fact i've had it crash once in the last 24 hours for a reason im still not sure of.

They'll probably release a patch to fix the problems ... hopefully atleast... personally im switching back to itunes6 until its fixed.

[Yixian @ Sep 14th 2006 10:49AM]

No problems at all here.

[craig @ Sep 14th 2006 10:49AM]

i haven't had any playback issues that i'm aware of, but i have had problems syncing with the ipod... has anyone else had this problem with iTunes 7?

I’ve always used iTunes to load songs onto my iPod (first revision 30gb 5th Gen). I don’t really use the Library feature—I don’t put songs in the iTunes library because I don’t listen to songs on my computer with iTunes.

To load a song onto my iPod, I just drag the song from the directory in Windows and drop it directly onto the iPod. This does not seem to be working with iTunes 7. I’ve tried dragging whole albums (all in one folder) and single mp3’s. The iPod and iTunes act like they’re working (the song appears to transfer), but the artist/song never shows up on the iPod.

The only way I can get songs onto my iPod is to first drag them into the iTunes library and then onto the iPod. This is a hassle. Has anyone else had this problem or know of a fix? Thanks.

[Liam Daly @ Sep 14th 2006 10:49AM]

the jerky audio playback I found completely uninstalling itunes then reinstalling it fresh seemed to fix it on my machine but its a resource hog, seems to be memory leaks all over the place

[Jason @ Sep 14th 2006 10:50AM]

I've experienced just a few, tiny, problems. It slowdowns in one of the certain playlist views (the 2nd one), and has problems downloading cover art. Doesn't really bother me though.. since I already have all the cover art, and I use a different playlist view. And my podcasts work perfectly...

Major glitches? No, just minor ones that you can pass by.

[Mac is over rated @ Sep 14th 2006 10:50AM]

I don't know where Mac got this reputation as the worlds best programmers. My Quick Time is always flaking out. Lots of their apps are boggy slow and unresponsive. Living in their perfect little hardware garden they throw stones at programs in the real world. As Mac regains some market share and they are forced the face the inherent incompatibilities that come from trying to support the worlds computing needs, we will see how truly behind they are. If you think living under a M$ global monopoly could you imagine a Mac dominated industry. *shudder* Too frightening!

[Twist @ Sep 14th 2006 10:51AM]

I haven't had any major problems (though the Cover Flow view is a bit glitchy). At first it was using a huge amount of CPU (my CPU meter was pegging at 70% with iTunes opened but not playing, load without iTunes was around 20%) but I walked away for a few hours and now it uses less CPU while playing than iTunes 6 used while idle. I figure it just needed some time to update the library and cache album covers (most of my mp3's already had them) and once that is done it behaves better.

[disciple83 @ Sep 14th 2006 10:51AM]

OK, the new release of iTunes is causing problems, it's software caught in the middle of a major battle for market share and media control dominance. Did you really think it was going to be flawless? I would hope not considering Apple has taken major shocks in the suit against Creative, Windows release of WMP11, which also supports DVD playback and supports anything PlayForSure. M$ is threatening Apple's stranglehold on integrated OS interfaces with Vista, while Creative, iRiver and Sansa are hitting at the PMP market. It was a salvage attempt. But don't think it will remain buggy, everyone puts out crap software when it comes to media management, from Xbox developers to M$ to Apple, everyone, no one is exempt, and over time they fix it. Why complain anyway? The software was free.

[Iamvery @ Sep 14th 2006 10:52AM]

My iTunes will not even stay open. It imediately crashes as soon as it opens. Seems like its related to the "determining gapless..." funciton running. I can't even figure out how to downgrade to 6.0.5 again. Has anyone found a fix for this? The only way I can even get iTunes to stay opened is to remove my library file (i.e. rename it)

[Paul @ Sep 14th 2006 10:52AM]

I have experienced the interference with tracks. I noticed it happens when using another program which is memory intensive. i.e. Adobe Photoshop

[John @ Sep 14th 2006 10:53AM]

Indeed, my 5g iPod was 'restored' without touching a single button within iTunes 7, also the music went nuts when scrolling within Windows Live Messenger and it is a major resource hog. Album art, it's not downloading any. I started using iTunes 4 till 6, no problems. I hate version 7! Boo Apple!

[Kevin @ Sep 14th 2006 10:54AM]

No problems here, although Cover Flow has inspired me to spend some time making sure all my tracks have album names and good quality artwork.

[trevc @ Sep 14th 2006 10:54AM]

It's messed up my collection.

I'll click on a song and a completely wrong song plays!!! This seems to have affected a small amount of my collection (10%) but it's 'really' annoying.

I am one of the 'stupid' ones that didn't backup first!

[Philofaxer @ Sep 14th 2006 10:54AM]

I haven't had a lot of time to play with it, but I have found it does a terrible job of picking cover art for compilations by various artists. It appears that it picks one random album from one artist on the compilation and then applies that cover art to all the tracks on the album. Stupid. Some of these compilations are very commonly available -- "No Alternative," for instance, has stupid Matthew Sweet cover art for every track. Why isn't it smart enough to download the No Alternative cover?

[Chris @ Sep 14th 2006 10:56AM]

disciple: yes its free... but the ipod wasnt and since u "technicaly" need itunes to use the ipod properly its a moot point, not to mention those that paid for songs via itunes ... just because the software is free doesnt mean the task it does is free. And the error is causing that task for many to be undoable or problematic

[varun @ Sep 14th 2006 10:57AM]

Memory usage is up - iTunes 6 was using about 52MB on my XP machine on Monday, iTunes 7 is close to 140MB, despite my having added one song in four days. I can't say I've noticed a slowdown, but then again, the computer is a little on the new and fast side, so I couldn't say. Syncing seems okay, but then again, I don't have the latest and greatest.

[Matt @ Sep 14th 2006 10:57AM]

I can not get the ipod games to work... it keeps saying "can not sync mini golf becuase this computer is not authorzied to use it" ......but its a fun way to burn 5 dollars and get mad...thats what they intend right?

[Chris @ Sep 14th 2006 11:00AM]

LMAO i didnt even think of checking the ram its using 113megs of memory... and people say wmp is bloated lol

[Ryan @ Sep 14th 2006 11:01AM]

My issues revolve around playing shared music from other machines. 7 wants to keep playing the last track it played while it buffers the stream for the next track, so i sometimes have to wait though listening to a song once or twice before it actually advances the tracks. And then very occassionally, it will buffer the same song twice and play clearly overlapping streams.

I'm using WinXP, not sure if this is a more common problem - but I'm headed back to iTunes 6.