Apple today has released an updated version of its popular flagship software. iTunes has been under the version 7 since the end of 2006 so this update is a much anticipated one.

iTunes 8 introduces a new Genius feature which analyses your music library, and then sends the thumbprint of that info back to Apple which then inturn suggest music that you might like. This might be seen as encroaching on Last.fm‘s territory. Last.fm for years has provided users with a means to take note of what music you listen to, put it on your own page with all statitics, recomendations of which songs you may like, and shows you people who have the same taste in music. Third party websites have even create this incredible wealth of information into highly detailed graphs.

Create great looking graphs for iTunes with Last.fm and lastgraph

Other features include:

* New grid view for displaying your albums
* Support for HD TV shows
* Support for second generation iPod Touch and 4th generation iPod nano
* New default visualizer

Over all these features are good but for a major point zero released this isn’t as big an update as one might have expected. The grid view is too dark and cluttered, the genius feature is just another way for Apple to palm off it’s itunes songs to you, and support for there own new products are a given. I was hoping for a great new user interface, I guess they feel they don’t need to fix something which isn’t broken. Unfortunatly Apple has built it’s entire empire on great design, and the thing about design is that, just like fashion, something that worked last year might not work the next. At lest they updated the visualizations, they look stunning!