iTunes 7.5 and QuickTime 7.3 okay so far, sort of

iTunes 7.5 and QuickTime 7.3 are working fine, in general, for us on our Leopard machine, so if you're having trouble, take heart: they should work. One reader write to us that the iTunes mini-window (the thing you get when you click the Zoom button in iTunes window) was not working properly - its buttons were not operating - but then he did a permissions repair with Disk Utility and things were fine after that. So, do take the usual steps if trouble seems to have resulted from this installation.

If iTunes won't open at all, Apple has some recommendations for you: Rebuild your iTunes Library, and remove any third-party add-ons (iTunes plug-ins).

We're getting some rather odd reports that AAC encoding is not behaving correctly. It's hard to say whether this is an iTunes problem or a QuickTime problem: the latter would probably be the case, since even if you do the encoding in iTunes, QuickTime is what does the actual work - though it could be iTunes failing to inform QuickTime correctly of what you want to do. One reader says:

I?ve found out that you can no longer encode an AAC file at full 320 kbit under Tiger. I first noticed the problem under iTunes 7.4.2 , I then tested under iTunes 7.3.2 and finally under the new 7.5 update. I ran up to 200 trials but none of them gave a 320kbit file. What I?ve got was some weird vbr values such as 303kbit, 351kbit. Most of the encoded files were between 201 and 315 kbit. The VBR checkbox was of course unchecked. When I tried the same iTunes versions on a machine with Tiger they all came out fine as 320 kbit.

And another:

I have been installing Leopard on my two computers, both with PowerPC chips. I encountered the following problem on both machines: I'm unable to convert CDs at 160 kbps AAC with consistent bitrates. If I choose 128 or 160 kbps AAC without VBR, the bitrates are all over the place, as if some kind of VBR is being used. On the other hand, if I do choose to use VBR with AAC, the variable bitrates are a little bit higher than those made without VBR. For example if I try to convert audio in 128 kbps AAC without VBR, the bitrates still vary from 107 to 130 kbps. They are not 128 kbps as they should be with this setting. But with 128 kbps AAC VBR setting, the resulting bitrates varies from 114 to 139 kbps.

So the main issue here is that the command to use CBR (constant bitrate) is not being obeyed; VBR (variable bitrate) is being used instead.

One very clear iTunes bug, reported to us by a reader and completely reproducible here, is that when you open for editing the rules of a Smart Playlist, and if that Smart Playlist has more than one rule, joined by "match ALL" or "match ANY", the pop-up will switch to "match ALL" even if you saved it last time with "match ANY". The workaround is to change the pop-up again before saving again, but it's easy to forget to do so.

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