Falling in love with iTunes – all over again

I’m like a kid on Christmas morning after unwrapping a brand-new shiny red bike.

For those of you not in the know, this evening (UK time) those nice people behind the iPod, the iPhone, the iMac and lots of other things not prefaced with an “i”, held one of their product launch events, introducing a brand new iPod nano, a revision to the iPod touch, new software for the iPhone and – joy of joys – iTunes 8.

Now, don’t get me wrong, iTunes 7.7 (the previous version) is a wonderful, wonderful thing; frankly I can’t think of a reason why anybody would use anything else for their digital music whether they use the near-ubiquitous iPod or not. But iTunes 8… aye caramba.

Genius: no, not an opinion but the latest feature. Pick a song in your library, click the Genius button and iTunes automatically creates a new playlist based around that song. This isn’t pure altruism, you also have the option of seeing a list of Genius songs for sale in the iTunes Store – but you can turn that off.

And, well, it just works – wonderfully.

As if that wasn’t enough – oh Apple, with these updates you’re really spoiling us – alongside the existing list and Coverflow views, iTunes 8 also adds something called grid view, where all your songs are denoted by a square lozenge, by either Album, Artist, Genre or Composer.

You’ve got to see this one to truly appreciate it.

Chuck into the mix that I “offloaded” my old iPod touch at the weekend, for only a little less than a brand new will now cost (that stuck it to “the man” at Computer Exchange!) – and, all in all, it’s been a good couple of days.

Now… which colour iPod nano should I buy…