iTunes 8.0

Earlier this week I heard from Shawn Saunders that Apple was having some type of big event to announce a bunch of new products and other things. He always gets very excited about this type of thing because he is an Apple product fanatic and loves to be on the cutting edge of everything Mac related.

Anyways, he had been hoping they were going to announce an updated version of the MacBook Pro because he has been wanting to upgrade, but he didn't luck out in that arena. Instead, Steve Jobs unveiled the new and improved iPod line along with a new version of iTunes that got a pretty hefty overhaul.

The newest version of iTunes is pretty cool if you ask me. It has a new feature called Genius that looks through your music library and depending upon which song you have selected will recommend a playlist of other music that fits that particular genre or feel. Also, it will offer new songs you can purchase from the iTunes store based upon your tendencies of taste within your music library. All in all, it makes for one rather intuitive piece of musical software.

The other new feature is how your songs are displayed with the new album artwork feature that lets you quickly find songs based upon the artwork normally displayed on the album if you were to purchase it in the store. It isn't really any better than the list format, but it sure looks cool.

Kanye West and Rihanna

For Holly's birthday this year I decided to go all out with one really big present instead of a bunch of smaller ones and get her tickets to the Kanye West concert she had been begging to go see for what seemed like forever. Now, the concert was on June 9th, and her birthday was on March 30th, so she had to do a little bit of waiting for the entire thing to happen, but in her opinion it was worth every second of waiting when she got to see Lupe Fiasco open up the night, followed by Pharrell and N.E.R.D. (she almost peed her pants in excitement when he went on stage), a little bit of Rihanna after that, and finally a 90 minute set by Kanye West himself. Here are a couple of somewhat decent pictures I managed to sneak on my cell phone of the Kanye West portion of the evening:The people at the E-Center were really intense about searching everyone before they went into the arena because I guess Kanye and Rihanna both did not want any cameras on the premises, so we had to get an actual pat-down before they would check out tickets. It was a little extreme if you ask me, especially since the arena was only about one third full when all was said and done.Holly was on her feet dancing and screaming away the entire time while I was just taking it all in and hoping my heart wouldn't skip a beat with the huge amount of bass pumping through the speakers. Out of the entire night, the only performance I really paid much attention to was the one by Rihanna because her music actually sounds like a song with a melody instead of the half talking/half screaming variety of the other three acts that evening. Most of my pictures of Rihanna came out really badly because she has some really bright lights going on during her performance, but I did manage to get one good one I can post:Holly had a great time, and that was the important thing. Megan was supposed to go with her on a fancy girls night out to scream their hearts away, but that plan fell through and so I was the escort for the evening. I don't think Holly minded too much in the end.