iTunes 9: LPs, Home Sharing, Redesign and More
Today Steve Jobs made a surprise appearance at the media event and announced iTunes 9. It’s packed full of new features including a major overhaul of the iTunes Store. Read on for details on all the updates.
iTunes LP
One of the downsides of digital music has been the lack of interactivity that you once got from handling album packaging. Apple has brought their own version of this back and its calling it iTunes LP.
iTunes LP is a way to interactive with new content including videos, photos, lyrics, discography, liner notes and more. Many of the LPs were created by the artists themselves.
Home Sharing
Home Sharing makes home networking work for you in that you can now share music, shows, and movies with up to five other authorized computers on you network. Secretly digging that new Britney Spears album your sister bought? Just grab it from her iTunes library and move it to yours. And then promptly punch yourself in the face for every digging Britney Spears.
iTunes Store Redesign
The iTunes store has been needing a facelift for quite a while. And a facelift it most certainly received!
Everything from the home page to artist pages, album pages, TV shows, and movie pages all received a major redesign.
In addition to the redesign is a new feature (one that I’ve wanted since the store debuted) called Wish List…and it’s exactly what you think it is. You can now add albums, songs, movies, shows to your Wish List to check out later and possibly purchase.
Genius Mixes
The iTunes Genius got a bit of an upgrade with a new featured called “Genius Mixes.” Genius Mixes automatically creates up to a dozen mixes of songs that it thinks would go great together.
App Organization
A much requested feature has been the ability to organize apps right in iTunes instead of fumbling through a half dozen screens trying to move tiny icons around with your finger. Now you can do just that.
Overall this is a much needed, and much welcomed update to iTunes and the iTunes Store. What are your favorite updates so far?
Tweet This (16)
Thomas Maier on September 9th, 2009 at 1:41 pm
I don’t have dark grid view? Am I the only one who does not like it?
GUI change: Ok, nice. But it is not that good that it is worth to throw away design consistency and the beauty of minimalism, isn’t it?
Skeptic on September 9th, 2009 at 1:55 pm
I like the Home Sharing idea. It would be great if they came up with something like that for iPhoto.
Dave Michael on September 9th, 2009 at 2:00 pm
I need clarification on the home sharing functionality. Does this now mean that I can load shared songs from another computer onto my iPhone?
Nancy Nally on September 9th, 2009 at 2:08 pm
All I can say about home sharing is that it is about freaking time they let my husband and I share our music libraries!
I have about 7 screens of apps on my iPhone and am thrilled that I can now organize them via iTunes. Doing it on the phone itself has been a major pain.
raszi on September 9th, 2009 at 2:10 pm
I could tell that the new version is loading large libraries much faster!
CQ on September 9th, 2009 at 3:43 pm
As far as I can tell, the iTunes Store redesign is not available here in Germany. Everything looks just as chaotic as before… a pity!
Nuno Campos on September 9th, 2009 at 4:37 pm
I had the same problem with the portuguese store.
Changed to the US store and then back into the portuguese and the redesign surfaced.
Tsubame on September 9th, 2009 at 4:45 pm
Is the ability to re-arrange apps exclusively for iPhone users? On my iPod Touch I’m just getting a big blank area next to the list of my apps.
Dave Michael on September 9th, 2009 at 4:55 pm
You have to update your iPhone as well, prior to being to rearrange apps.
Dave Michael on September 9th, 2009 at 4:55 pm
That should read “prior to being able to rearrange apps.”
Sajid Khan on September 9th, 2009 at 5:59 pm
iTunes 9 Grid view mode appears broken. Mine is currently sorting by Composer only; the tabs for Artist and Albums have disappeared, so has the slider allowing you to resize the tiles. Can anyone figure out how to change this?
Genius Mixes look promising, however there doesn’t appear to be a way of refreshing the mixes.
Kyle on September 9th, 2009 at 9:27 pm
While in Grid View, go to View>>Grid View>Show Header. That gets you the slider and Artist, Album, Genre, and Composer tabs.
Sajid Khan on September 10th, 2009 at 1:08 am
Thank you :-)
Em on September 15th, 2009 at 10:57 pm
I’ve spent the last like 4 hours trying to figure out why i couldn’t view Albums, (iTunes support) and finally i found that you have to turn the damned thing on. THank you for FINALLY letting me know what to do. I mean really, apple? did you really think hiding these headers would be a good thing. Have you tested this design?
Bryan on October 20th, 2009 at 4:10 pm
I’m having the same problem; I’m stuck on artists but can’t view albums or composers.
Scott Rose on September 10th, 2009 at 6:29 am
The iTunes Store has always had the ability to make wishlist playlists where you could drag-and-drop unpurchased content into any number of playlists that you wanted, but these wishlists were locally stored on your individual computer. This new wishlist capability in iTunes 9 is even nicer, because it is server-based.
Galley on September 10th, 2009 at 6:33 am
You’ll have to pry my CDs out of my cold dead hands. With that being said, the “iTunes LP” format does look nice.
jayelaudio on September 10th, 2009 at 7:35 am
For “Home-Sharing” to work, does all of the music have to be purchased through iTunes? Or can it be any song in my iTunes library?
Rahul on September 11th, 2009 at 11:27 am
Seems cool.. but most of the updates concerning the iTunes Store doens’t really matter to us living here in South Africa. We don’t even have a proper store! But it looks good nonetheless, just haven’t updated to it yet.
Glenn on September 11th, 2009 at 4:00 pm
I’m excited by many of the changes but where has the Genre|Artist|Album top window is list view gone? I can only see the horrid little column browser.
The top list window was my primary way to view all my music. With so much music it wasn’t perfect but it was a lot easier to select from than scrolling through a complete list? Anyone? I’d rather not go back to 8 to see it. Surely it has to still be there somewhere???
Glenn on September 11th, 2009 at 4:27 pm
Ahh I’d been searching the net for a couple of hours before posting that question, and now I find it! For anyone else that’s interested:
Go View>As List.
Go View>Show Column Browser.
Go View>Column Browser>On Top.
! Awesome. Very Happy Now.
I especially like the new look of the iTunes Store
Motley on November 2nd, 2009 at 4:33 pm
Thank god somebody posted how to view column browser on top. I finally updated to new itunes and for the past half hour I tried to figure it out. Think I would have went back to old itunes if this wasn’t possible.
Thanx
Em on September 15th, 2009 at 11:00 pm
I am very unhappy with itunes 9. It took 2days for it to recognize my ipod, and 4 hours to find how to turn on the album view. WAY too much redesign with no warning and no easy way to find how to make things go back (like a “classic view” perhaps). And i don’t know how to go back to 8. 8 was easy. Everything just worked. I don’t want to spend time figuring out how to work the same software that was fine before i downloaded the freaking “update”. Whatever.
vaibhav on November 2nd, 2009 at 9:43 am
Hi I can not see other options on top on iTunes store.
Stuck with only app store and iTunesU…
Right below the apple logo, next to Home Icon…I dont have podcasts, audiobooks…
I have reinstalled iTunes, but same thing…
iTunes version 9.0.1.8
Somebody please advice… thank you!
vaibhav on November 3rd, 2009 at 8:06 am
well.. I got it working..
All I had to do is change my country from bottom of the page under iTunes…
No podcasts were available for India… I selected US and can download it all!