Apple Releases iTunes 4.6

sinclair44 writes "Apple has released iTunes 4.6. The new version 'includes support for playing your music wirelessly using AirPort Express with AirTunes. It also includes a number of other minor enhancements.' The update is also available in Mac OS X's Software Update."

Comments

Disables Hymn-ed songs?

[bubba451]

These iTunes versions lately seem to be sneaking in unadvertised anti-piracy "features."

One poster in the macrumors forums claims that songs de-DRMed through Hymn no longer play.

Can anyone verify?

AirTunes

[wedding]

I'm curious to see how AirTunes works with multiple speaker sets. If I can pump the same playlist to the stereo in my front room, my bedroom, my living room and the one outside, then Apple has just sold 4 Airport Express boxes. The cost of four will be much less than the cost (dollars+personal time) of running all that wiring and getting the speaker sets to all work well.

Can't wait to get my hands on this tonight!

iTunes sharing / DAAP / TunesBrowser / GetTunes.

[crazney]

So I've just checked iTunes 4.6 and it appears to NOT break iTunes sharing, unlike last time.

I've updated my iTunes webpage to mention this.

Anyhow, one really cool feature that it seems to add for that AirTunes stuff is the ability to 'push' music upwards, rather than just pull down. This will allow one to control remote devices (what music is playing). Now I just can't wait to get my hands on an (Australian) AirPort Express device to reverse it. I can already think of a tonne of applications for this.

Just strip the tags to play the de-DRM'd files

[Anonymous Coward]

Simply run the HYMN de-DRM'd files through a tag remover such as tgutf, and "poof!"... you're good to go. Of course, you'll have to add whatever tags you use back into the file, but at least iTunes will now play them.

Re:iTunes sharing / DAAP / TunesBrowser / GetTunes

[rufo]

A friend of mine is an Apple Sales Consultant - he's downloaded the presentation from Apple's consultant website and provided the two following tidbits of info:

First, the iTunes program is re-encoding everything into Apple Lossless, then sending that wirelessly to the Airport Express station. So if you want to get a head start, start reverse-engineering that.

Even when that's done, there's still one other small problem; apparently Apple is encrypting the music streams sent to said Airport Express stations.

He said the presentation he downloaded wasn't particularly clear on either of these two points so I could be wrong here, but it sounds very plausible to me.