iTunes 9 came out today, with a plethora of new features and functionality. I’ve spent the afternoon listening to music from my MacBook iTunes library (not my full 600GB+ desktop library), and have some initial thoughts.
I’m not an iTunes store user (as far as music downloads go), so I won’t have much to say about such changes, other than that it looks more attractive, and has navigation akin to an OS X app.
Since iTunes 7, the focus of the multimedia application has centered around better ways to browse and interact with your media. Cover flow and grid/album view provide more visual ways to peruse your library, and are great for the casual user who manages a small collection of music. However, these features never wowed me because they failed to provide any logical use case for someone who has more than 60,000 songs in their library. Scrolling through thousands of albums - many with cover art, others that must be found and imported - proved impractical to me and left me using the tried and true ‘List’ view.
iTunes 9 provides a much more intuitive list view interface. Users can arrange their informational columns on top (the traditional way) or to the side. At first I was a little confused about why I would want to use the new side column setup. I didn’t even see a column for ‘album’ which was a little off-putting since I’m mainly an album listener. However, going to the View > Column Browser menu setting allowed me to not only toggle between top/side view, but also allowed me to choose and what columns remained on the left at all times. I chose to include the artist and album columns, the main two ways I go about browsing my music.
Separating out my albums into a more defined and permanent column makes it easier for me to browse exactly what I’m looking for. I think any live music collector, or anyone with a large music library, will find this view provides them more real estate on the screen vertically, while constantly keeping the important stuff in front of you.
The next feature I stumbled upon was ‘Genius Mix.’ These are essentially an extension of the genius feature introduced in iTunes 8, and a more advanced leveraging of the data Apple has collected from users. I received 4 stations in my (considerably small) library:
- Jamband Mix: Phish, Grateful Dead, Widespread Panic, moe. and more
- Rock Mix: Radiohead, Wilco, Gomez, The Decemberists and more
- Alternative Mix: Iron & Wine, Death Cab For Cutie, Peter Bjorn & John,
- Alternative Mix 2: Modest Mouse, Yeah Yeah Yeahs, Spoon and more
I realized quickly that the key to these “stations” are the amount of music you have that fits into the iTunes genius category. My Jamband and Alt mixes were considerably more diverse than the Rock mix, which seemed to just pull from what crossed over from the other two genres. Utilizing my desktop genius results, I have a feeling that I’ll have dozens of stations and a diverse set of genres to play from. A synthesis of your genius results from multiple machines would make this feature more useful wherever you’re at, but in typical Apple fashion we may have to wait some time for such functionality to come alive.
Nonetheless, I think this is a great way for someone like myself to better interact with a massive amount of content that resides on my computer. I like Pandora, but at the same time I’d rather sift through all the albums I’ve downloaded and haven’t gotten to listening to, or already consider a staple of my listening. Centralizing my music listening to one application (iTunes) makes a lot of sense for me, especially since I use airTunes and the Apple TV to stream much of my music to different sets of speakers.
Other features appeal to me in terms of the thought and logic put into them, but perhaps not their execution. The ‘home sharing’ feature is great because it allows you to share and sync media between multiple local computers. I’d love to do this, but how useful is it if your roommate, significant other, or family can only share music by using one centralized apple ID? I’d imagine even most married couples have individual accounts for their iTunes, and with good reason: Apple really provides no way to make individual purchases and be part of a family “group.” The HP MediaSmart iTunes server remains the only decent way to sync iTunes libraries, but is probably not the most cost-effective way to do so.
Another new feature from iTunes is their “iTunes LP.” Basically they give you liner notes, lyrics, track lists, photos, etc… for an album, all nicely presented. This is great if you buy your content from iTunes, but what if I already own that album in my library? It’d be wonderful if I could use the interface or have it available to me with my OWN (assumably purchased) content. I don’t see Apple budging on this though, they see the LP as a way to create competitive advantage in the mp3 market.
Overall, iTunes 9 is a great step forward. The interface features updated bevels and curves to give new life to long recognizable interfaces, and integration with your iPod or iPhone is even better. I especially like how easy it is to view, search, and sync your iPhone apps back to your iTunes library. For the first time in several years, it feels like Apple actually cares about improving the multimedia experience for their customers.
As an iPhone and iPod user, I’m naturally drawn to using iTunes. For other less invested users, iTunes may still not be the preferred music or multimedia application. However, if you maintain a large library of music, and own an iPod or iPhone, you’ll be very satisfied with the upgrades in iTunes 9.
