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.)