Apple Declutters, Speeds Up iTunes With Major Upgrade 295
Hugh Pickens writes writes "The Washington Post reports that Apple has finally unveiled their new version of iTunes, overhauling its look and feel and integrating it more closely with the company's iCloud Internet- storage service with one of the biggest upgrades Apple has made to the program with 400 million potential users since its debut more than a decade ago. The new design of iTunes moves away from the spreadsheet format that Apple has featured since its debut and adds more art and information about musicians, movies and television shows. It also adds recommendation features so users can find new material. According to David Pogue of the NY Times Apple has fixed some of the dumber design elements that have always plagued iTunes. 'For years, the store was represented only as one item in the left-side list, lost among less important entries like Radio and Podcasts. Now a single button in the upper-right corner switches between iTunes's two personalities: Store (meaning Apple's stuff) and Library (meaning your stuff).' Unfortunately, Apple hasn't fixed the Search box. As before, you can't specify in advance what you're looking for: an app, a song, a TV show, a book. Whatever you type into the Search box finds everything that matches, and you can't filter it until after you search. It feels like a two-step process when one should do. 'Improvements in visual navigation and a more logical arrangement of tools are good, but for me the biggest positive within iTunes 11 remains its vastly improved performance on all three Macs I've tested it on, including a relatively ancient five-year-old MacBook,' writes Jonny Evans."
Re:To much selling me shit. (Score:5, Informative)
Huh? Can't really see your point: There is just that one button to the iTunes Store and a link if you right-click an album. And if you don't like that, you can disable it in the parental settings.
Re:To much selling me shit. (Score:4, Informative)
The interface spends too much time trying to sell me shit. I just want to play my music and podcasts.
I use Winamp with the iPod plug in. Probably doesn't work for ya if you use stream via iTunes, but I have never bought any music via them, so I don't care.
Re:Goodbye Windows 8 (Score:0, Informative)
itunes still is a shitty program
Re:To much selling me shit. (Score:5, Informative)
The article is also in error. They found shortly after release that you could limit the scope of the search field to the selected library, a wildcard match within that library category, or a title match within that category under your library. I suspect this information is a few days too stale. You just select the dropdown in the search box, and deselect the 'Search Entire Library' option.
CNET overviews the removed features (Score:4, Informative)
7 Features Apple Killed Off in iTunes 11 [cnet.com]. I was originally annoyed by removing the ability to edit the 'gapless' state of files (removing that one just seems stupid), but as no other player I use on any other platform supports the feature, I gave up caring.
Re:uhh excuse me but wtf (Score:5, Informative)
First webstore without DRM ? What are you smoking ??
Re:Still can't use on Linux, still not buying (Score:5, Informative)
The ATH uses-all-one-cpu bug is still in there (Score:5, Informative)
For some reason, on some machines the ATH.exe (wifi sync) will take up 100% of one CPU. Happened on the old iTunes, happens on the new iTunes. https://discussions.apple.com/message/20463456?ac_cid=tw123456#20463456 [apple.com]
Re:Still can't use on Linux, still not buying (Score:2, Informative)
In other news [twolofbees.com] Linux users pay more than Windows and Mac users at humblebundle.com, but that's no shit I guess, so you're right.
Not that I think it's bad, but it must be nice to have those big front donations from single users skewing the average, eh?
Honestly I don't think there's much difference between the average users in terms of how much they spend, or their likelihood of buying something.
Comment removed (Score:3, Informative)
Re:uhh excuse me but wtf (Score:5, Informative)
The movies still have DRM. I believe the books also use a proprietary extension to ePub, but I don't think it's currently used to implement DRM.
Re:uhh excuse me but wtf (Score:5, Informative)
I dislike the AAC tracks which are incompatible with everything
Incompatible? Anything that plays AVC (aka H.264) encoded MP4 video also happens to play iTunes m4a files. AAC appears to be supported on more home and mobile entertainment devices than Vorbis.
I also find it kind of sad that those who bought those DRM (128-bit) laden tracks are not getting those tracks either upgraded to a higher quality version
Not sad as much as stupid because Apple offers a deep discount on DRM-free repurchases of tracks previously purchased with FairPlay DRM.
Re:Still can't use on Linux, still not buying (Score:5, Informative)
Buy Windows and run it in a VM.
...or simply use one of the great players and Linux...and a store that is OS agnostic.
Re: Can I have v 10 back? (Score:4, Informative)
You can change it to look like 10.0, it's two clicks, show menu, show left thingie, done
Next step: fix the iPod (Score:5, Informative)
I got my iPod nano 1G replaced with a 6G in the battery recall program, and it feels like a downgrade.
- The interface defaults to the useless album art screen, so that's one extra action every time you want to do anything.
- A touchscreen is way inferior to the clickwheel. It's now impossible to operate the iPod without looking at it, even for simple things like skipping a track. So I attached a remote controller which halves its battery life.
- the touchscreen also means that you have to press the button to wake up the screen before you can do anything. Two actions before you get to a useful screen.
- Some idiot has decided that when you're playing music from a playlist, you then can't easily navigate back to the playlist from the default (album art) screen. You have to go all the way back to Music->Playlist->select the list you're in->scroll down to wherever you are.
Re:To much selling me shit. (Score:5, Informative)
Then go to the Parental Controls Preferences and disable the iTunes Store.
Wasn't too hard, was it?
Re:uhh excuse me but wtf (Score:5, Informative)
I'm not sure if you're trolling or you're just uninformed.
Personally I dislike the AAC tracks which are incompatible with everything, which is the trouble with patent encumbered formats [No MP3 has nothing like the same problems].
I haven't had trouble playing Apple's AAC files in Windows media player or VLC, so I'm under the impression they're not too difficult to find a player for. And if anything MP3s have worse patent issues than AAC. MP3s require a licensing fee for selling encoders, decoders, and any files that are encoded with MP3. AAC, however, does not require that you may a license for encoded files.
I also find it kind of sad that those who bought those DRM (128-bit) laden tracks are not getting those tracks either upgraded to a higher quality version...or having the DRM removed.
Generally they have enabled users to upgrade. There are a few tracks were were sold as DRM-encumbered and then removed from the store, and some of those haven't been upgraded, but I know I can re-download my old purchases without DRM at 256kbps whenever I want.
Re:Still can't use on Linux, still not buying (Score:4, Informative)
Because there are a lot more than five. Android, which uses the same kernel as GNU/Linux, is beating iOS on phones, neck and neck on 7-10" tablets, and about to beat it handily on game consoles this coming April unless Apple gets apps onto Apple TV pronto.
And now the real facts.
1) Android is ahead on phones.
2) Apple is ahead on tablets (55% to Andorid's 44%).
3) Apple is way ahead of Android on games.
4) iOS is actually the biggest games platform there is. Selling more games than any other platform.
5) There's an announcement of an Android console shipping next April. It's effect on the market is entirely unknown. But tepples hopes it turns everything around.
6) Tepples also wants a pony.
Re:To much selling me shit. (Score:2, Informative)
Quicktime is a core part of the OS. The iTunes library is accessed by other software, both from Apple and 3rd parties. It is about as well integrated as IE was, in that you can remove it but doing so will break things.
Not so (Score:5, Informative)
Quicktime is a core part of the OS.
No it's not. It does exactly what you would want a media-playing subsystem to do - just helps playing media.
There's no point in removing it, but you can easily bypass or expand on it - Perian is an example plugin that adds support for additional media formats.
And Quicktime has nothing to do with iTunes other than help it play media - but you could also use VLC.
The iTunes library is accessed by other software
Yes, but it's an open format that anyone can just read and convert to something else if they really wanted.
It is about as well integrated as IE was, in that you can remove it but doing so will break things.
What would it break? Nothing would break. That's an absurd statement. Nothing in the system would care if you removed iTunes or the library.
Re:Guest accounts (Score:5, Informative)
Why are you syncing a visitor's phone with your iTunes library?
Because the visitor wanted to charge his phone, and iTunes "helpfully" started. Or because I want to share one song with a given visitor.
That wouldn't do what you claim it does. The reasons are a bit convoluted, but basically, there are two ways to manage an iDevice through iTunes: 1) Automatic Syncing and 2) Manually Managing it.
If you have it set to auto-sync, then it ties your device to a specific computer, and if you plug it into any other computer, a warning will pop up in iTunes that says, "Hey, this iDevice belongs to another computer, if you sync it here you lose everything and start over," and gives you options to cancel, sync & erase, or transfer over purchased songs that the computer is authorized to play (e.g., iTunes has the iTunes Store Account info for already) but that aren't already actually present on the computer. None of these would lead to duplicate tracks on your computer. Do nothing and the phone will charge while the dialog is up. Hit cancel and the phone will charge without syncing. It's simply not possible for the type of syncing you describe to happen in the "helpful" manner you describe. Also, in this scenario you can't transfer a single song to the user's iDevice since all syncing is automatic.
Then there's manual management. Here, it never syncs unless you tell it to. In this case, simply plugging in the device would not cause a sync operation at all. You could (on all devices except iPhones and Shuffles), copy over a single track from your library to there iDevice in this scenario, but it wouldn't copy anything to your computer without you manually dragging it from the iDevice to your Library in iTunes.
So basically, nothing you said makes much sense. Active intervention from the user is required to make their iDevice do anything at all with a copy of iTunes that is not their own, period. That's not to say that you didn't at some point run into a bug that led to multiple copies of tracks, but it's not happening the way you claim. iTunes just doesn't work that way.
Re:To much selling me shit. (Score:4, Informative)
No, that's not what they are talking about. This is about searching in the iTunes store: there is still no way to indicate you are searching for an app, a song or a TV series, and you get all of them in the search results. When in the iTunes store, the search field has no drop down.
And the drop down in the search field when browsing your library was already there in iTunes 10, with the All / Artist / Album / Composer / Song options. They just added the "Search Entire Library" option now.