When little follow-up information came to light after the opportunity we had to play with an alpha-quality version of iTunes 5.0 two months ago, even we wondered what the heck was going on. Breaking news from Apple-X.net seems to answer this question, as the Mixing Table feature is not the only feature we recognized in this screenshot. Take notice also of the "Record" button in the lower-right-hand corner of the iTunes window; that is the new yet impressively mature Audio Recording support that is built into iTunes.
Simply plug in any audio input device, and hit that button with the red dot; a new AAC (by default; MP3, AIFF, and WAV are also options) file will be recorded and the audio from the input recorded into it in real-time. This makes importing your wax/vinyl, 8-tracks, casette tapes, DAT, or just about anything else under the sun a simple task. It's also great for use with your built-in or USB microphone, to get surprisingly good recording quality for your garage band or to take voice notes.
iTunes 5 is really going to knock the socks off of a lot of folks, and is going to signal Apple's strong entrance into not just playback of music, but also its creation. Professional solutions for music authoring will also be part of the same event which sees the introduction of iTunes 5 -- and we think that event may very well be Macworld SF.
