So-So Review for iTunes 10

Ars Technica reports: By now, most iTunes users have already downloaded and installed iTunes 10. We've already given you the low-down on the biggest addition to the new version of iTunes—the Ping social network—but we also wanted to give our impressions on two "improvements" promised in the release notes: look-and-feel and performance. While we agree that iTunes is "faster and more responsive," we're not sold on the revised user interface.

Let's face it, performance is not iTunes' strong suit. I have a decent-sized library of some 6,700 tracks, for a total of 30GB of storage space—I can listen to music for nearly 51 days straight without ever hearing the same song twice. That is not a small music library, but it certainly doesn't compare to many people I know that complain that an iPod classic still isn't big enough to hold their library.

If music was all that iTunes had to manage, juggling those 6,700 tracks wouldn't be much trouble. But it also keeps track of movies, TV shows, music videos, ePub and PDF books, iPhoto libraries, iPods, iPhones, iPads, audio books, iTunes U content, podcasts, Internet radio stations, other local iTunes libraries on the network well, you get the idea. Apple has piled additional functionality on software that originally started life as a Mac OS 8 MP3 player to the point where it is practically bursting at its Carbon seams.

For those with large libraries hoping for a full Cocoa rewrite, this is not the iTunes update you've been looking for. But while iTunes 8 and 9 got progressively slower—it got to the point that switching to iTunes to skip a track or stop it to answer a phone call was a five to ten second trial of patience—Apple promised that iTunes 10 would offer faster performance.

After playing with the new version for the better part of a day, we can honestly say it is a little snappier. It certainly doesn't suffer from the unresponsive UI that plagued iTunes 9 on my aging original Core Duo MacBook. Specific genres and artists load instantly in the browser. Flipping through albums in Cover Flow seems especially fast. And the new list view with album art scrolls like butter.

We're not sure what Apple is using behind the scenes—it's certainly not Cocoa, and Apple didn't respond to our questions about what specific enhancements had been added. After using both iTunes 9 and iTunes 10 with Activity Monitor running, it does seem that iTunes is using more threads and may be using a little more (about 5 percent) CPU time than before. It's not more efficient, but it is perceptibly faster—at this point, it's a trade-off we can accept.

We still hope for a fully turbo-charged, block-using, GCD-enabled, Cocoa-fied version of iTunes with blazing performance. iTunes 10 isn't there yet, but the tweaks that are there are welcome.