See? Sometimes it pays to broadcast super-late. Uncle Steve's iTunes Music Store anniversary conference call isn't slated to start for hours yet, but somehow we have an inkling of what he might want to talk about. First, at about 1 AM EDT, faithful viewer charles noticed that the iTMS was "temporarily unavailable," and when it came back a little before 2, faithful viewer Michael Wyszomierski informed us of all sorts of funky fresh new flava bursting forth from the New and Improved™ store. Trust us, it's like a party in your mouth and everyone's invited.

Check it out, right there in the middle of the storefront there's a link to information about a brand spankin' new iTunes 4.5, and the features just keep right on coming. Take, for example, "Single of the Week." Apparently Apple's going to be giving away "great music from emerging artists" every Tuesday from now on. Sure, the song of any given week might not be up your alley, but it's free, so you have no right to complain. (Which is also, coincidentally enough, why any hate mail we get about our lateness/lameness/poor personal hygiene habits are merrily dispatched to the Trash with a grin.) The first free song appears to be a Foo Fighters track, but at broadcast time the whole "free" thing didn't appear to be working yet. That's okay, we can wait. We have the patience of ten men. Ten really, really impatient men.

But wait, there's more: a new "iMix" feature lets you "publish your playlists for all the world to see" (although, as far as we can make out, not "for all the world to hear"). Go on, come out of the closet on that whole Spice Girls addiction. We're sure all the world will understand. And if they don't, who needs 'em? Especially since you can hole up with iTunes 4.5 and just watch music videos and movie trailers all day long. Or poke around through the "most-played tunes on your favorite radio station" chosen from the charts of over 1,200 stations nationwide.

Now how much would you pay? Well, don't answer yet, because we're just getting started. Have you ever wanted something like the iPod's on-the-go playlist on your desktop? Then you'll probably dig Party Shuffle, "a new dynamic playlist that's always on and ready to party." (Who wrote this copy, the guy who did the "Monster Ballads" commercials? "They taught us how to love!!") Now you can apparently queue songs up as you're listening, which is just the thing for madcap revellers who don't want to be tied down to one of those stodgy static playlists.

And if you order within the next ten minutes, Apple will throw in still more magic-- like a lossless encoder (finally!) which lets you rip your CDs at full quality and store them in half the space, automatic CD insert printing that builds nifty montages from album art of the included songs, a Wish List feature to make it all that much easier to blow all your cash on music downloads, links from your own music library to related music at the iTMS to make it all that much easier to blow more than all your cash on music downloads, and-- ready for this?-- Windows Media support. Well, sort of. You can import existing WMA files, assuming they're unprotected (meaning, no Napster/Walmart/MusicMatch tracks) and you're using iTunes for Windows. Awww, it's Windows-only? Boo hoo hoo, we're crushed. Or we would be, if there were a single Mac user on the planet who actually had the poor taste to have a library of WMA music in the first place.

Oh, jeez-- we almost forgot to mention the changes to the iTMS usage rights! The bad news is, the limit on the number of times you can burn a given playlist containing iTMS tracks to CD has dropped from 10 to 7. The good news is that not many people are likely to want seven burned copies of a single playlist anyway, unless they're illegally distributing them to others-- and who would do such a heinous thing? Anyway, the better news is that the number of computers you can authorize to play your protected music just went up from 3 to 5, which has us hooting with joy here at the AtAT compound, where we have way too many Macs for our own good kicking around. At least now we can use a couple more of them as remote music terminals.

Whew, that's a whole lotta stuff. iTunes 4.5 is indeed available immediately; we're happily rockin' out with it right now. (Party Shuffle has obligingly chosen A Flock of Seagulls alongside Dinah Washington, Talking Heads, and Bikini Kill.) So far our only big complaint is that apparently the little circle-arrow links in the Library only link to the iTMS, when it'd be much more useful if, say, an option-click linked to all songs of the artist or album in the Library itself. Oh, wait-- we just tried it, and it does. Never mind. Everything's perfect. Go download. And here's hoping Steve wasn't expecting any of this to be a surprise come 11:30 AM EDT, because if he was, he's gonna be in one baaaaaaad mood.