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Apple Declutters, Speeds Up iTunes With Major Upgrade
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."
The layout on the top bar helps to separate out: player from store from device management. I will admit I do like the sidebar with the old layout for familiarity.
Anyway I think the big difference is that more of the functionality is exposed on the interface, sort of like an office application. I think they are assuming that iTunes user base is sort of stable and they can make things less obvious. That's a typical Apple pattern:
lots of new users = aim for obviousness
lots of experienced users = decrease obviousness and increase features
I was looking at an artists website, and clicked on the link to buy an album. It too me to the iTunes website. OK I thought, I'll try it. Except that I couldn't. To actually buy the album it said I had to do so through the iTunes software. Whoops. I guess I won't be buying anything from iTunes at all then.
You know, 'cause I run GNU/Linux.
It doesn't matter how fast the software is, if I am required to use it to buy shit, I ain't buying it. Websites work as store front ends for many other people, so why not Apple?
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.
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.
Be seeing you...
As a PC user, always found Apple's software beyond the OS baffling and counterintuitive, probably because they hide what they are doing. Something as simple as moving and saving songs to my phone seems like an excercise in frustration - syncing is not backing up for some reason and I always end up with duplicate songs or apps from other family members' devices. If they didn't have to hide the file system.
Amazing that a company that makes decent hardware and a decent OS and ok apps can't make decent software. Hope this update fixes some of the bullshit.
Too many of the same old flaws are still there. For example, it insists on sorting artist rather than composer in many views. If I have an album where two different pieces have different featured soloist artists, it insists in some views as treating it as two separate albums, while other views may not. For larger works, this can be a problem, like the complete symphonies of Haydn.
Groupings remain the red-headed stepchild, poorly used, despite being the only way to logically group together movements of a larger work within an album.
It introduced a few new flaws. In playlist view, it appears trivial to turn on shuffle and start playing a random piece. In library/songs view, that no longer appears possible. Multiple testing shows it always plays the first piece of the playlist, then shuffles.
The column browser is gone, just gone inside a playlist. I have some very large playlists. I want to be able to use the column browser within that playlist. I now have to go outside the playlist to the library view and use that, hoping I remember correctly the criteria that form the smart playlists.
I never had much of a performance issue, so I can't speak to that, but the first thing I turned off was album art based views. If I wanted an album, I'd pick it from the column browser.
"I may disagree with what you say, but I will defend unto the death your right to say it." -- Voltaire
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.
7 Features Apple Killed Off in iTunes 11. 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.
"But remember, most lynch mobs aren't this nice." (H.Simpson)
-- Joe
First webstore without DRM ? What are you smoking ??
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
"Sometimes a woman is a kind of religion, she can save your soul & set you free from all your sins" - Bad Examples
Once I figured out how to get it to sort my albums by title rather than artist again, I have to say I'm getting used to the minimalist interface. iTunes has always been minimal on features, so it never made sense that its UI was such a mess. Now it's more, uh, pushbutton-y? Feels like it was designed for touchscreens, oddly enough. I definitely like the new pop-out Visualizer, now I can properly have that running on my secondary display without jumping back and forth between the full interface. The only thing I'm not digging is how double-clicking an album immediately starts playing it instead of opening the song list. There's actually no way to get to that song list anymore, you have to start the album and then skip to the track you want, else you have to sort through the Songs view which includes your entire library. Oh well.
Does that work with the new iPods and iPhones? Because frankly I'm tired of dealing with customers that have a buggy iTunes, I swear iTunes on Windows is probably the most buggy thing I've had to deal with in awhile, so if there is something I could give them and say "If it gets buggy again use this instead" that would be quite helpful.
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
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.
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.
I stopped paying for music after cd's. Just rebuilt my mp3 collection in less than 2 months by borrowing/ripping library CDs. After having backed up over 9000 tracks to flashdrive, I'm done for awhile. :-)
Incidentally, if it keeps prompting you for a password that you keep cancelling, the answer is apparently to delete all stored web content... in Safari. (It worked for me.) Whether or not it is good that other applications apparently have unrestricted access to your Safari cookies is left as an exercise for the reader.
You can change it to look like 10.0, it's two clicks, show menu, show left thingie, done
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.
Yeah, listening to both music and podcasts this morning, the interface isn't trying to sell me anything at all.
Maybe someone got confused by the iToonz Extreme Premium Platinum free trial on their BigBox box.
are you looking at the same iTunes 11 I am? in music mode, it just shows me a player on the top bar with simple controls(Previous track, play, next track), a volume slider and search.
Then a mode sensitive bar where I can switch between various types of media, different categories in those types of media, and any devices connected. Then a simple interface for picking items from that category.
Compare that to the default WinAmp install which is kind of a bloody mess.
Non impediti ratione cogitationus.
The Power search tool, in the uTunes store is gone. For those who use this to find versions of a song, or research other tunes by artists, this is a valuable tool
Republican leadership = Idiocracy
Not sad as much as stupid because Apple offers a deep discount on DRM-free repurchases of tracks previously purchased with FairPlay DRM.
Wow, a discount for redownloading an already purchased track? How magnanimous. /sarcasm
Given that the new copy is also encoded with a higher bitrate and presumably a new version of the encoder with a better tuned psychoacoustic model, I'd think it merits the 30 cent upgrade fee even apart from the lack of digital restrictions management.
Then go to the Parental Controls Preferences and disable the iTunes Store.
Wasn't too hard, was it?
#exclude <ms/windows.h>
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.
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.
What the fuck are you on? How is it so tightly integrated like IE? Does another music player not work if you delete iTunes? Does deleting iTunes causes your computer not to run, can't install updates and any number of OS essential tasks to stop working?
Jesus, so you don't like it, but do you have to throw in all the lies as well?
I really like the redesign visually and speed wise. It's impressive since I haven't used Itunes regularly in half a decade. My main program of choice has been Foobar2000. It's instantaneous in its library even with 100 thousand songs. When I heard the new itunes was much faster and saw the beautiful screenshots I had to check it out.
Itunes 10 opening speed with a large library was well over 15 seconds on an SSD. Itunes 11 is now around 2. Foobar2000 is about half a second, but still, very impressive.
The minimal features are nice and your average luddite will love it. I love the new album/artist view. At times it's too minimal, for instance the hidden menu bar, you have to click a tiny button in the top left and 'enable menu bar', I'm sure that will trip many people up. The old annoyances are still there. Folder Management is still essentially manual, either add folder (after enabling old menu bar) or drag to the "add to Itunes library". To me this just seems archaic, every other music player out there will watch a folder. You have to sign up with an Apple ID to automatically search for album art! Really? The only other option is to manually 'get info' and add the album in, Itunes won't read images in folders (folder.jpg for example). Apple then embeds and mangles the audio files. I much prefer foobar, I can not only efficiently add high quality album art with an external (album art downloader) program but can have booklet/back/cd images as well.
The other aspect is all the extra crud Apple still adds when you install the program, several extra services and processes (itunes helper, apple updater), that just serve to annoy you. Even though I have 32GB of ram it's still fairly crazy Itunes uses 300mb of ram with just 10 albums added, foobar2000 was around 50mb.Still kudos to apple for taking on their most obviously lacking product and making even me think twice about my player choice, time will tell what the future is as spotify and other services seem to be what many are moving towards.
Hells bells, they removed the progress bar on mini player. I don't use my partner's iMac all that much, but I do use it to manage voice diction and to sync podcasts onto our iPod. Some of my dictation files are long. Without a progress bar, it's really difficult to note and return to critical thoughts. But I only used iTunes as a stopgap measure, so I can sit back and enjoy the suffering of others more deeply invested.
What a triumph of populist design over broad-minded utility. There's a fair amount of frustration, annoyance, and anger out there over Apple's random feature regression of the moment. I used to tell people to install Ubuntu because, you know, we had continuity all figured out. Since the Unity debacle, I keep my mouth shut.
Apple also removed the multiple window feature. So much for workflow equity. How do people live in a world with no feature continuity? I would have never guessed at the outset of PC era thirty years ago that things could go this direction, and people would stand for it. It's pretty much my personal definition of low self-esteem to see someone suffer a major setback in their workflow equity and go "oh, well". Maybe I should have completed Learned Helplessness 101 after all. I'm starting to think it really is a life skill _and_ you save a fortune in Tums.
The foolishness we all felt back in the day that upgrades were built on top of what you had already delivered. Turns out we could have just randomly discarded any feature that bored us or seemed inconvenient to maintain, and without any explanation to the customer, either. Shit, did we ever do things the hard way.
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.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Did they fix the bugs, the performance issues, the crashes, the thrashing of the library, the sync issues, the poor UI, the hiding of fields when they don't work properly making it near impossible to troubleshoot, the unresponsive UI, the resource hog?
Most of that they do seem to have fixed or at least made better. The new one is much faster for me on a large library, and also I think the UI is much better and clearer once you get used to it.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
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.
A million times this, play songs and get the fuck out of the way.
Preferences > Parental > Disable iTunes Store (check box), (click ok).
Wasn't so hard, was it?
I guess most people haven't noticed, because nobody else has said anything about it. The link you describe are so far to the right of the song listings that there's no chance of accidentally clicking it. I actually had to open it up to see if you were right, and I've used it every day since Thursday. Furthermore, I actually like it! It's a really quick way to see more songs by an artist, without having to leave your library.
Regardless of what you think about it, it's only two links on the screen at any given time. As for "buy now" on everything in the store, well...it's a store. What do you expect?
If you can't convince them, convict them.
IANAn Apple user, but isn't there a way to remove drm's from Apple music, by burning the tracks to disc then copying them back from the disc?
I stopped paying for music after cd's. Just rebuilt my mp3 collection in less than 2 months by borrowing/ripping library CDs. After having backed up over 9000 tracks to flashdrive, I'm done for awhile. :-)
Yes, you can do that. You can also pay a small upgrade fee (about $0.20 per track in the US store I think?) to upgrade all of your prior DRM purchases to the new unencumbered versions.
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.
No, I certainly wouldn't complain if they, say, made the device act as a USB drive so I could just copy the damn files or use whatever media player/manager I wanted to.
In what is supposed to be a discussion about iTunes 11, you're now criticising the device, and want to use something other than iTunes. QED. No chance to iTunes would make you happy because you're an Android fanboy.
But fanboys always try to dismiss everyone else as fanboys first, like a kind of pre-emptive strike.
So now you're accusing me of being a fanboy. Way to make a point and condemn yourself with it in a single sentence.
For me it's nothing to do with a preemptive strike. You've just made it plain in every Apple discussion on Slashdot that you are arguing from an Android fanboy perspective. And you're welcome to be an Android fanboy. But it does make your critiques on Apple's products worthless.
The problem is the choices are abiguous at best and the consequences are hard to see. Itunes is an enigma for the normal user
Nonsense. iTunes is designed for the normal user. It's the geeks that are used to the Windows and Linux ways of manually managing audio files that get confused.
It should be as simple as hooking my friends iDevice to my computer and dragging the song over.
There you go. You want it to work like your legacy device.
Hell there is no native way to share data between an iphone and an ipad in the field and you think this state of affairs is totally ok?
Seems you've never heard of iCloud.
I had a PDF on my phone i jsut downloaded, i wanted to view it on my non cellular ipad. they both have wifi, i should be able to transfer anything between them without need of a third party, be it cloud, wifi AP, etc. They should be able to effortlessly talk to each other with no outside influence at all. They are 100% technically capable of this behavior. It may come as a surprise to you, but not all of us relish the idea of filtering our digital life thorugh the cloud unecessarily. I shouldnt have to be connected to the internet to share a pdf between 2 wifi enable computers, period.
Good-bye
The problem with Google Music is that it is still US only. Not even in Canada can we make use of it. I will consider Google music the day its availble to me.
The iTunes Music store and, to some extent, Amazon are the only legal options outside of the USA.
Jumpstart the tartan drive.