iTunes 9: Everything You Need to Know

September 9th, 2009, 20:19 Posted By: wraggster



Yeah, so all those reports about a new scheme to "stimulate sales of CD-length music" were true, and then some: On top of extras with for albums and movies, iTunes 9 comes with media sharing (!) and iPhone app management.

Here's what's new in the most significant upgrade to iTunes in years:

iTunes LPs: These are effectively like bonus CDs for digital albums. Each one comes with only get if you plunk down nearly $20 on the whole album. Along with that, you get video content—in most cases, live concert recordings—as well as photo albums and lyrics, which serve as sort of modern-day liner notes, I guess? The description also mentions even more tracks, none of which are listed, downloadable or not, in the normal iTunes panel. So, it's sort of like buying one of those loaded-up "Digipack" CDs people used to release, except on iTunes. Many albums come with a special display mode, so all this fancy new content isn't just dump into iTunes' regular audio and video browsers.

iTunes Extra: Like iTunes LPs for films, this gives you a downloadable equivalent of DVD extras, with interviews, extra clips and photo galleries. Some of the extras, like the ones for Wall-E shown here, are a little more interactive, and have their own full interface.


A New Store: As for the store itself, all content is now organized in a new iTunes interface, which looks a lot more like a software interface, and less like a heavily-formatted webpage. For example, you can now quick-view albums, which opens a Preview-style windows that lets you see what's behind a given link in the store, and there's an ever-present menu bar that lives up top, replacing the cumbersome breadcrumb navigation that was there before.

Media Sharing: The software's getting some pretty fantastic new functionality outside the store as well—we've got media sharing, at least on your local network: You can copy songs, movies, and TV shows to up to 5 authorized computers, or simply stream them. This is pretty huge, and a definite about-face for Apple, who's been stripping out sharing functionality from iTunes for a while.

An App Manager: On the iPhone/iPod front, now you can rearrange and manage apps from iTunes, which was one of those stupid-simple feature upgrades people (and by people, I mean we) have been clamoring for for months. Apple's version of the app manager is more well thought out than the concepts we've seen before, which were already droolworthy. Apps can be dragged and dropped, either alone or in groups, and selectively synced. Awesome.

Syncing, Genius and Social Networking: A few odds and ends here—iTunes 9 also brings finer sync controls, including options to sync genres or artists, instead of just playlists. New "Genius Playlists," which are just general library mixes that iTunes thinks you'll like, rathers that the old Genius playlists, which were based on a particular artist.

To put this another way, iTunes, did you just get good?
iTunes 9 Gallery


iTunes 9 is available today, as is plenty of iTunes LP and Extra content. For more, stay tuned to our liveblog.

http://gizmodo.com/5355615/itunes-9-...u-need-to-know

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