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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."
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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
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.