iTunes 4.9 Chapters in Depth

Have you heard the news? iTunes 4.9 is out and it supports, of all things, podcasting. This is exciting news, however, the most exciting thing is the smallest touch.

Chapters, my friends, are what podcasts have been missing since their inception. Apple has released a tool (currently in beta) that allows you to set marks on a MPEG4 AAC file. When iTunes reaches the time you have decided on it will display a certain picture or textual link in the Album Art box of iTunes.

See some pictures of this in action, and more of my excited ramblings, after the jump.

The first thing you'll notice when you play a podcast with chapters (like Adam Curry's Podfinder, or Apple's New Music Tuesday) is the little icon to the left. It is a book with a cute little bookmark in it, and when  you click on it you are presented with all of the chapters in the podcast so you can jump from one point to another.

It looks a little something like this:

Pretty cool, huh?

That's not all!  Let's say you want to hear about 'Fly With Me,' so you click on chapter one. This brings the audio to the start of chapter one, and the album art displayed to the right. This is where the magic happens. See that link there that is labeled 'Fly With Me'? If you click on it, that will take you to the 'Fly With Me' section of the iTunes Music Store. This is awesome.

There is nothing stopping a person from, say, making those links correspond to whatever they are talking about. If you are talking about TUAW you can send your listeners here with a simple click.

Apple, I applaud you.

Now, I have to say that this is only supported in the AAC format, a format that only Apple at the moment supports. However, I think podcast producers will really like this and start adopting the AAC format for their shows.