What’s new in iTunes 10
Well, it took Apple a few hours longer than an anticipated to release this hotly anticipated whole-number update of the world’s most-popular jukebox, device management and online music-movie-TV-app storefront. So, what’s new and what didn’t make the cut?
Latish last night, I pulled together a explanation to explain why Apple hadn’t yet released iTunes 10. Whether music publisher intransigence was a factor or the issue has gone to ground isn’t known.
However, never underestimate the willingness of people in the institutional music biz to put their foot, individually or collectively, in their mouth and then summarily foot themselves in the same foot.
Nevertheless, Apple has released iTunes 10 (82MB, see also: iTunes 10 for Windows) and it’s arrived with 30-second song previews, not the promised 90-second ones music publishers found so offensive that they had to send a lawyer out of their bunker to do battle.
Outside the splatter zone
In addition to a significant number of security fixes (end o’ the list), there are significant functional changes under the hood:
- • Ping is a iTunes-specific community for following favorite artists and friends, or connect with music fans. Discover the music.
• Rent HD TV episodes for 99¢ each. Watch them on your Mac or PC, on-the-go with iPhone or iPod touch, or in your living room via new Apple TV.
• Compatible with new iPod touch, iPod nano, iPod shuffle and Apple TV.
• Play music wirelessly with AirPlay on AirPlay-enabled speakers, home theater receivers, and iPod accessories.
• Look-and-feel improvements throughout iTunes.
• Enjoy performance improvements that make iTunes faster and more responsive.
• Additional voice support with VoiceOver Kit for iPod.
• I counted 13 security issues addressed
If you click the very familiar “Like” button beneath a song or album listing, you will be asked if you want start Ping, Apple’s new social network for music. Assuming you do, you will be asked to confirm a big honking Terms and Conditions, and make o’ choices vis-a-vis privacy/participation, like whether or you want to let people follow you.
Lastly, you will be presented with listings of artists and people that Apple thinks you might want to follow.
All-in-all, assuming the Terms and Conditions didn’t obligate me to bonded service in an Asian sweat shop, the process was quick and benign. The rest I will leave to you to discover — it looks and acts just like Steve’s demo.
More hands on
Starting iTunes is faster, but it doesn’t just snap into place. Thereupon, whereas I don’t have a huge library (50+ gigabytes), it is stored on an external hard drive.
And, this brings up a bone of contention. For folks with massive collections on machines with tons of RAM, where’s 64-bit for the Mac? Come on, Apple…
The user interface has been completely revamped with a new look and feel, including colors and icons — scrolling through is much more responsive. The layout, as noted by Steve in the keynote, has changed as well with album art now a default part of the list view, which reminds of the tunes that I never bothered to associate with images.
Also, navigating the iTunes Store feels a lot more responsive. You’ve got to wonder if the company’s new and massive server farm in North Carolina is playing a role here?
iTunes 10 seems to have dredged many of the podcasts that I unsubscribed (and some associated episodes) over the last year or so, and relisted them for me to make go away again. Further, I think podcasts are downloading faster.
The Command + Zero shortcut in video (reduces video to half size) is gone (i.e. you have to grab the lower left corner and manually resize it), which is a feature I used to use every day. Happily, iTunes did remember the position and size of a podcast I had partially watched, closed and then restarted.
iTunes 10 seamlessly pulled in all of my playlists and the listed number of tracks roughly corresponds to what I had before the upgrade. That is, I think iTunes might have dredged up stuff I previously deleted.
Syncing my iPad was not faster, though I’m hopeful that only this first sync with iTunes 10 will be just as painfully slow as it ever was…
What new and interesting stuff have you found in iTunes 10?
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September 3rd, 2010
My only complaint is that the entire left hand sidebar has now been converted to an ugly bland of grey.
What happened to the little tidbits of color we had that appeared more bright in the sea of one generic shade?
It seems to be a crazy fad these days to make interfaces entirely bland and eliminate everything colorful.
September 5th, 2010
and yet there is still no ‘play next’ feature in your main library, even tho numerous people have requested this :@
September 6th, 2010
Opened itunes to see a flood of music that was no longer found in my library. Which included both music I had deleted weeks ago and music which still could be found in the same folder that it was in before I upgraded. The volume slide is bigger, and uglier. The new icons look like they came from a retro real player, remember real player? Real is company who tries to make money off of rhapsody, a monthly subscription music licensing program. Apple is still in the past with no 64bit support which further fuels the pc>mac debate. Which they are.
New itunes 10…6/10
What a waste of time
September 6th, 2010
Still would have like the visualizers featured on the mac for windows users. But we cant have everything can we.
September 8th, 2010
I’m sticking with 9. I have a nice dark interface mod for it and it won’t work on 10.
September 9th, 2010
the fps in the visualizers are about 10 times slower
September 12th, 2010
Don’t care for the very bland look. Seems more jumbled and confusing to me. Slide bars are not totally visable which makes it difficult to know if you’re getting to the end of a list. Change is usually good but so far I’m not impressed.
September 20th, 2010
I can’t, for the life of me, figure out WHY Apple is going out of their way to take COLOR out of their designs. I’ve been asking myself this about the company for the past few years. Those G3 iMacs were SO FREAKING COOL! I don’t care if they were CRT all-in-ones, they were cosmetically to die for, as sales showed.
Why don’t the iPhone, iPod Touch, and iPod Classic come in colors? It works for the Nanos and even increases sales, so why not produce the bigger boys in colors too?
Finally, what the %$#@! is going on with iTunes? iTunes 6 was the BEST iTunes I’ve used yet. DAAP file sharing was where it was at, first of all, and everything was extremely navigable (including the preferences menus). The best part was that it was very light on its feet. 256 mb of RAM did the trick perfectly. And the Visualizer ran smooth, practically no matter what kind of video card you had.
Now, it’s getting to be a bulkier program, so it requires more memory (easily forgiven), but why does the Visualizer keep requiring bigger and better hardware as it ages? I’m speaking mainly in terms of the Classic Visualizer. In this latest release (10), the new visualizer runs better than the Classic on my machine. What did they change? What was wrong with it to begin with?
The volume bar is disgusting. It looks like cold, rough steel. I understand that this is an Apple program and that it is designed primarily for OSX, but I’m running Windows 7 and I love the look of the operating system. Shiny, smooth, translucent glass. Something I want to look at, something I’d like to touch. But steel? Reminds me of a Compaq BIOS screen from 1999.
Why in the world did they rip the color out of the source icons in the left column? Apple’s quickly starting to become the new Tandy. Might as well make iTunes 11 beige.
Lastly, where the #$$# did the iTunes Logo go? Who designed this little blue button piece of crap? It’s the cheapest-looking blue color I’ve ever seen. It looks like the logo from one of those cheap MP3 players you pick up at places like Staples. Or one of those fake programs you accidentally download thinking you found a new way to get free music. I saw that logo after iTunes 10 installed and automatically assumed it was adware.
This version of iTunes: 2/10
It got a 2 simply for still playing music. I miss the simplicity of iTunes as a music player. I don’t mind the iTunes store, and I don’t mind the implementation of video and such. But I don’t enjoy having things taken away from me. Like color and speed.
Until some spectacular update, I’m officially switching to Winamp. Milkdrop rules anyway.
September 20th, 2010
It’s iTunes, just as easy to use as always, just as restrictive as it’s been for years. Still looks better than any other player, despite the negative comments people make. Face it, you’re all just typical people resistant to any change, good or bad.
As a player, it’s unchanged. You still can’t copy songs off a device and will need a third-party unauthorized app to do so.
Not sure if it was there in 9, but you can turn off auto-syncing for any device just to make sure you don’t accidentally sync anything. I use my 60 gig iPod on three different machines, and have friends using their iPods/iPhones on some of those machines occasionally, so that option is important.
Beyond that, it’s still easy to make playlists, the mini player shortcut remains unchanged (it was annoying that they changed it a few versions back).
If you “can’t stand” this version of iTunes, you didn’t like it before and/or were looking to not like it anyway. If you’re on a Mac and want something Winamp-esque, I recommend Cog. Otherwise, it’s the same ‘ol iTunes.
September 21st, 2010
To EvoSero:
It’s iTunes, yes. But it isn’t quite as smooth as the previous versions. The Visualizer, a very important feature to some people, is not smooth at all unless you have a really high power PC. Whereas in the older versions, you could run it smoothly without even needing a graphics card. This is obviously because of improvements in the resolution, but still…Milkdrop, one of the best visualizers ever and VERY modern, requires less horsepower than the iTunes CLASSIC visualizer in iTunes 10.
As a player, it is unchanged…no argument there, except for the fact that it keeps requiring more and more memory to do the same things. Cliche Apple things like Genius and Ping are to blame. I don’t use these things. They are both very useful, but you can tell that the programming within them is so complex that it sucks up a crapload of memory, because of how it runs a little slower each time there’s an update.
Auto-syncing was an option in 9, yes. I’m pretty sure it was an option since the original iPod was released.
It is very easy to make playlists still and I do still prefer the interface and overall organization to all other players. But why fix what’s not broken? If it’s going to run slower when you update anyway, why strip the program of anything at all? Be it performance or just something as minuscule as colored icons, why take them away?
And, Mr. Hardcore Applefan (judging by your last paragraph), I love iTunes. I always have. But I CAN’T STAND this version. Why? Because it clearly doesn’t run as smoothly, it requires better hardware to run entirely as a program because of some stupid little addon that you can’t turn off, and it’s practically black and white. This version of iTunes looks and runs like shit. There’s no defending it: It simply isn’t as enjoyable as versions 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, or 9 were.
November 4th, 2010
Thank you for the review, but your grasp of English is shocking! I hope it is your second language, because if you are a native English speaker something has gone wrong somewhere…
January 1st, 2011
I downloaded the new update, straight from the program, and found all my music has been erased. Not in my library, not on my hard drive under ‘iTunes Music’. Gone. Thoroughly unimpressed.