I found out yesterday that iTunes 4.5 had been released, with a slew of new features including 'Party Shuffle', iMix (share your playlists over the iTMS), album covers and lossless encoding! There's a good review of it over at Jim Heid's Mac iLife 04 Site.
One thing I did notice from his article was the following: "More rights, fewer rights. In iTunes 4.5, you can authorize up to five Macs or Windows computers to play your purchased music — up from three. But Apple giveth and Apple taketh away: you can now burn a playlist containing purchased music up to seven times (down from ten). And the old workaround of simply changing the playlist slightly does not work."
One of the great things about the iTMS was that you could burn the playlist 10 times, then modify it slightly and burn it again. I personally wouldn't do that (as I rarely burn music CDs…), but I can see many people having a problem with that, as once you've burnt the song 7 times, that's it.
I'd also be interested to know how good the Apple Lossless Encoder is. I'm wondering why they didn't use something like FLAC or SHN for it, since they're already widely available? I haven't seen anything yet detailed what format is used…
