Okay, so now you've had a day with iTunes 4.5 to kick the tires and see what's what; did you find all the gotchas? Because there are definitely a few of them skulking beneath the surface, and while most users might be too enthralled with the whole automatic-CD-label-with-pretty-pictures thing to notice, the more perceptive among you might have experienced a couple of "hold the phone a minute, Mabel" sort of moments. You're very perceptive. We bet you were always really good at Where's Waldo, too.

For example, faithful viewer Belleferret was first to note the sharing incompatibility; while shared playlists from earlier versions of iTunes are visible in 4.5, they're not actually accessible. Likewise, playlists shared in iTunes 4.5 can't be streamed to systems running earlier versions of the software. There may well be a legitimate technical reason why this is so, but conspiracy theorists are narrowing their eyes into suspicious slits, rubbing their chins thoughtfully, and pegging the whole thing as an ingenious scheme on Apple's part to encourage the widest possible adoption of 4.5 among users in environments where the whole Rendezvous sharing thing is used pretty heavily-- say, colleges and universities.

Why? Well, several viewers who, coincidentally enough, all wanted to remain anonymous (for some reason) discovered another little change to iTunes 4.5: those various song-unlocking tools that strip the FairPlay Digital Rights Management from purchased iTMS tracks have suddenly been rendered useless. So Apple chased PlayFair from SourceForge all the way to India, had it yoinked from those servers, too, and has now managed to hobble the application via some tricky little chunk o' code lurking in the iTunes 4.5 distribution. And with 4.5 playlists not being sharable with earlier iTunes clients, early adopters rush to upgrade and only discover after the fact that everyone's going to have to upgrade in order to keep the flow going. As a totally coincidental side effect (sssh!), upgraders suddenly lose the ability to unlock purchased music. Pretty sneaky, sis.

In addition to all that, there's also a sequence of keystrokes and mouse clicks that triggers seizures, heart trauma, and bad credit, but we're not going to tell you what that specific sequence happens to be, because we don't want to ruin all the surprises.

Anyway, it's not all about undocumented snags; there are some nice undocumented (or perhaps just sparsely documented-- we honestly didn't bother to check, because we are busy international jet-set important people who are far too big-league to read the effin' manual) features, too. We already mentioned the whole deal with option-clicking on those arrow-links from your Library to the iTMS to make them link back to your Library instead; well, to add to that, faithful viewer Doug Smart has discovered that iTunes 4.5 now plays nice with Panther's Fast User Switching. You can finally fire up a playlist in one user account, switch to another account, and the playlist will keep right on rockin' out in the background. Handy!

So anyway, iTunes 4.5 is obviously an application with layers. It's a complex beast that defies your facile attempts to force it into simple categories. It is slippy, like the wind. Embrace it, baby; surrender to the complexity, and only then will iTunes 4.5 offer up its innermost secrets to you. (Or you could probably also just read the online help, but that's sort of the wussy way out.)

Meanwhile, how about that there Jobsian iTunes Music Store anniversary conference call, hmmmmm? MacMinute has some nice coverage of what went down, just in case you were off somewhere busily being not-an-analyst or something. We don't want to go into it all in too much depth, but the big news is the official first year's sales tally: the iTMS officially cleared about 70 million songs in its first year in business. That's nothing to sneeze at, especially if you remember that before the launch, Apple's goal was to sell one million songs in the first six months. 70 million in a year pretty much blows that initial target all to pieces; as Steve put it, "a year ago, if someone had predicted 70 million songs sold, they would have been laughed out of the building."

Of course, that doesn't change the fact that Apple's most recently revised goal was to sell 100 million songs by, well, today-- and the last we checked, 70 is rather less than 100. (Thank you, college degree!) And while sites like The Register are perfectly right to report that "Apple undershot its first-year iTunes Music Store download target by 30 million songs," we thought it was overstating things a bit to claim that Steve had "forecast sales of 100 million songs." A goal, especially one that Steve called "a really high bar," is not quite the same thing as a "forecast." After all, our goal down here at the AtAT compound is to conquer and enslave the entire western hemisphere by Labor Day, but that doesn't mean we actually expect it to happen.

Okay, so that takes care of our weak apologist excuses; now let's move on to assigning blame! Remember when Steve admitted that Apple just wasn't going to hit that 100 million song target in part because of a lame response to the Pepsi promo? At the time we tossed together a few numbers and determined that Apple would sell 65 million songs directly, but Steve was expecting only 5 to 10 million winning yellow caps would actually be redeemed. Well, guess what? Our predictive math was correct. Faithful viewer neopod pointed us toward a CNET article which confirms that "about 5 million free songs have been given away through a Pepsi promotion, far fewer than the 100 million tracks that could have been redeemed."

Apple admits that the response to the Pepsi promo wasn't anywhere near as strong as it'd hoped, and largely blames the redemption shortfall on those pesky distribution problems (which kept yellow-capped bottles out of L.A., for example, until the final two weeks of the promo period). We, on the other hand, have decided to blame all of you guys.

Yes, you. C'mon, you knew weeks and weeks ago that Pepsi downloads were way lower than Apple wanted, and yet you didn't immediately run out and guzzle 37.5 gallons of sugar water apiece in order to score your maximum 200 free songs. And not having any game pieces in your area is no excuse; whatever happened to the grand tradition of a seven-hour road trip into friendlier Pepsi promo territory just for the sake of lending Apple a hand? Face it: you could've done more to prevent Apple from facing this embarrassment. A lot more.

What did we do to turn things around? Well, once we finally found yellow-capped Sierra Mist in Cambridge, we bought one.

It, uh, didn't win.

Still, we made an effort. See? So don't go blaming us.

Unfortunately, we need to finish up this episode on a somewhat serious note: we suspect that Steve Jobs may be in need of some form of psychiatric treatment. While we've observed no behavior that might indicate that he's a danger to himself and others (yet), we're concerned about what is clearly the man's unhealthy obsession with toast and the whole toasting process. Something about it's just not right.

Starting to think that we might need a little therapy? Well, yeah, we do, but not about this toast thing. See, faithful viewer Munificent Paraclete noted that, in response to an analyst's question about what extra features might make it into future versions of the iPod, Steve reportedly replied, "Our next step is that we want it to make toast." And sure, we get the point; "it's the music, stupid," and the iPod is all about being the best portable music player bar none. Adding features like those long-rumored video capabilities would be just as extraneous and detrimental to the product's focus as welding on a toaster. Great. But why, specifically, toast?

See, he already made the toast joke before-- at an analyst meeting, no less, so probably to the same exact audience as the folks listening in today. You remember, right? It was last November, and in response to a very similar sort of question about whether Apple would integrate television features into its Macs à la those wacky Media Center PCs that Microsoft is pushing, Steve remarked "We're not gonna go that direction, we're gonna integrate toasters and computers. Because we think people want toast when they're working on their computers. We can have computer control, just get it exactly how you-- we can put up pictures of toast, you pick the one that looks like what you want, and it'll come right out the side. We think it's a much better idea." The man clearly has some sort of fixation on toast, particularly as a sarcasm-laced metaphor for superfluous features.

Well, either that or he's just fresh out of new material so he's recycling the same tired old gags out of necessity. (You know, kinda like us. "Ballmer is apelike!" "Mike Dell is a copycat!" All that stuff.)

So here's hoping it's just an overused joke and not a budding toast-based psychosis ticking away like a mental time bomb. By the way, how freakin' prescient were we when, hours before the conference call and the ensuing toast spiel, we joked that one of iTunes 4.5's new features was "extra-wide slots for toasting bagels, plus a convenient crumb tray"? It's like we have real powers. Woo-hoo! Kreskin can bite us!