iTunes updated to look more like... WMP?

I actually asked for that feature a year ago, so it will be nice to see if it has actually been implemented.

(Actually thinking about it more you could probably do it by creating a smart playlist for each podcast, matching on album name, filtering to a playcount of 0, ordering by date added and limiting to one item, and then making another smart playlist that aggregates all the items in each of the individual podcast playlists for syncing to the ipod, but thats rather a lot of configuration to set up for a fairly simple requirement.)

At the moment I only have access to a Shuffle which doesn't have the option of syncing podcasts at all..

My Nano went missing some time ago, at the moment I'm using my Rio Karma in my car. I still have a Nano dock, radio remote, and about 1000 iTunes tracks, so I'm rather pointed in that direction when looking for a replacement, but the Zune is tempting too.

iTunes can get really slow and lock up almost continuously if you store your files on a network share instead of a local hard drive, but add them to the local library. Especially if your files are stored on a slow NAS device and accessed of a weak wireless connection.

WMP doesn't fare much better in this regard.

It would be nice to have an zeroconf iTunes server built into the Nas like the Asus WL-700gE, (which is probably rendered non-functional now due to the protocol changes in iTunes 7)

But music can only be streamed from a remote server, it cannot be copied to a locally attached ipod, and there is no way to rip a cd in a local drive and store the files directly on a server other than changing your library folder itself which causes other problems.

What you need to support for laptop users is the ability to divide the library into a small subset kept on the laptop drive (say 5GB), and the full library stored on a server (20GB). When in range of the server you get the full set, all accessible any synchable, but when out of range it falls back to the local subset and doesn't attempt to play or access metadata for files it can no longer reach.

(Thats the sort of situation I really hoped a network aware version of WinFS would be able to solve)

Having said all that I'm really enjoying the new Coverflow view, it beats WMP11 and really feels like you have all your CDs lined up on a infinitely long shelf inside your computer. It makes your music collection feel more like a tangible asset than just a bunch of bits.