Apple introduces iTunes 4.5

Not much of a shocker… On the first anniversary of the iTunes Music Store, Apple posts major iTunes upgrade. A bunch of nice features in there. With our giant hard drives these days, the Apple Lossless Encoder seems like a good feature (though isn’t there a standard format for lossless encodings?) They’re now allowing you to authorize five computers for listening to your purchased music, which is pretty reasonable and might be a response to the recent activity around PlayFair and DeDRMS.

Playlists can be published on the iTunes Music Store, which seems really smart. Supposedly, many Napster users discovered new music by looking at what other people had on their machines. This serves a similar purpose.

Strangely, the article says that you can now view movie trailers in iTMS. It’s a music store! Give me music video previews or something, rather than movie trailers.

Sounds like a decent upgrade on the whole, though.