6 ms·
Apple releases iTunes 11
- jfb 14y agoLooks a lot like iTunes 10. And … the bug I opened in 2008 is still there! Sweet. Sort your library by Album/Year, and then reverse direction (year descending.) Reverses album order. E_WONTFIX.
- nimeshneema 14y agoA lot of visual as well as functional features has been added (see http://www.apple.com/itunes/whats-new/ http://www.apple.com/itunes/whats-new/). And the iTunes store has been redesigned as well.
- jonknee 14y agoNot at all actually. http://images.pcworld.com/reviews/graphics/products/uploaded/apple_itunes_10.html_664578_g2.jpg http://images.pcworld.com/reviews/graphics/products/uploaded... vs http://images.apple.com/itunes/whats-new/images/redesigned_player_libraryviews1.jpg http://images.apple.com/itunes/whats-new/images/redesigned_p... There's no sidebar for quick access to things, you have to click album art to select a song, etc. It's a very large UI departure. You can return it to more normal though by viewing by "song" and then selecting View > Show Sidebar.
- k-mcgrady 14y agoYou can show the sidebar again from the view menu.
- jfb 14y agoIt hasn't added any useful metadata features. It doesn't appear to cache the downsampled synced versions of music. The default view is different, but it's trivial to get back to the well understood two/three pane layout. There's more iCloud stuff. The "Up Next" feature is pretty nice.
- htp 14y agoI had some trouble finding where the sort options went, so for anyone else who's struggling to find them: Go to View => View Options… (or hit Command-J).
- rsenk330 14y agoI've been using iTunes DJ a lot lately, but it doesn't appear to exist anymore. Am I missing something?
- vineel 14y agoYeah, I couldn't find it either. I'm still setting up Genius, so it may have been rolled into that.
- parrots 14y agoI noticed the same. I think that's replace with the "Up Next" feature - basically letting you queue songs to an ad-hoc playlist as you go.
- whichdan 14y agoI'm still waiting for iTunes to have a normal queue that only plays the songs in it.
- htp 14y agoHow would this differ from a playlist and/or Up Next?
- e1ven 14y agoI've been waiting for "Up Next" Since I migrated from Winamp - Being able to play a song, and then realize "I know what would go PERFECTLY after this", is very useful. Or listening to music, selecting a much of tracks, and throwing them in the queue, without the hassle of creating a playlist ahead of time. Very pleased!
- whichdan 14y agoI upgraded iTunes right after I wrote the post - Up Next is exactly what I was hoping for.
- joejohnson 14y agoIt's there, it's now called Up Next.
- lectrick 14y agoI would like Apple to release a damn API to the iDevices so that some other motherfucker can innovate on this clusterfuck of an old codebase
- omfg 14y agoThe new version is a ground up rewrite..
- jfb 14y agoI find that difficult to credit - I don't have any insider info., but that's not how Apple goes, for the most part. Also, if they were doing a total rewrite (as they did with FCP or iMovie) I would expect the outcome to be much more different from iTunes 10 than 11 is.
- danieldk 14y agoI find that difficult to credit - I don't have any insider info., but that's not how Apple goes, for the most part. From my first experience, it does seem to be whole lot faster than iTunes < 11. I also like interface more.
- jfb 14y agoNo question good work was done. But I imagine a complete rewrite would involve say non-modal preference dialogs just to pick a long-running irritation out of a hat.
- danudey 14y agoSeconded. The preferences dialog appears to be completely unchanged from iTunes 10. What's especially irritating about this is that modal preferences dialogs with 'Ok'/'Cancel' buttons have been discouraged since, as far as I'm aware, the 10.0 HIG.
- 14y ago
- vineel 14y agoI just downloaded this. I really like the new design, especially the new album view feature. The most interesting update to me is iTunes Match: http://www.apple.com/itunes/itunes-match/ http://www.apple.com/itunes/itunes-match/
- cmer 14y agoDid they make changes to iTunes Match at all? This is actually my favorite Apple service nobody knows about.
- vineel 14y agoMy bad, I thought it was new.
- kmf 14y agoHmm. As far as I can tell, not much about iTunes Match has been updated. It's been available since iOS 5 (and whatever the corresponding iTunes update was -- 10.x?)
- vineel 14y agoOh, for some reason I'd never heard of it until this update. My mistake.
- deleted 14y ago[deleted]
- SG- 14y agoIt seems finally the green maximize button no longer toggles the mini player mode and actually does what it's supposed to do.
- Historiopode 14y agoThe new UI is quite nice, although its striking similarity to Sonora's design leaves me with quite a bitter aftertaste. Unfortunately there seem to be no substantial improvements over metadata and format handling; it looks like I will keep missing foobar2k for a long time still.
- Argorak 14y agoI really like the new mini player. Its finally useful, as it finally includes all main music listening tasks including search.
- Argorak 14y agoI have to take that back. The mini player considers "space" the same as "enter" and just hits whatever has focus at the moment. Also, it tends to select "back" if you refocus.
- krickle 14y agoI wish they would release us from iTunes or at least let me use the damned thing with my work and home computer.
- garand 14y agoHere's the old icon for anyone that want's it. http://grnd.cc/LEbh http://grnd.cc/LEbh
- sbmassey 14y agoDoes it do anything more sensible with pdf's and epub's?
- dchest 14y agoNope.
- ishansharma 14y agoIt works well for me on Windows but there are no significant performance improvements. Design is no doubt better. I still wonder why Apple doesn't use their $100 billion to get some A-grade software engineers. Steve Jobs used to boast about A-level players and all that. But current mess that iTunes is can't be from A-level players. And don't even get me started on Safari for Windows. Apple just seems to have dropped ball completely on it!
- jfb 14y agoI wonder who you think works on clang/llvm (or CoreAudio, or xnu, or Quicktime)? People who can't get jobs writing Rails models for consumer web startups?
- olgeni 14y ago> I wonder who you think works on clang/llvm (or CoreAudio, or xnu, or Quicktime)? People smart enough not to get anywhere near iTunes? (really, would you trade clang or kernel dev for that?)
- jfb 14y agoTouché! In fairness, though, the iTunes client team is a lot smaller than most people probably realize. Problems with the software are almost certainly the fault of management trying to do more with less, and not the competence (in my experience, extremely high) of the individual devs.
- ishansharma 14y agoThe point was that a lot of Apple customers and iTunes is only Apple software they use(Windows). If it is so bad, it does not make a good impression. A company can't go around saying that they put best devs and people on work with this bad software around! Granted, iTunes 11 is an improvement but it's still not very different from iTunes 10!
- blktiger 14y agoApple did drop the ball on it... they said they are no longer going to do any development work on it. It's just as well, if you want a good browser on Windows you should be using Chrome or Firefox anyway.
- rmrfrmrf 14y agoThat logo just keeps getting more and more atrocious. Goodness.
- hcarvalhoalves 14y agoIcon you mean.
- hcarvalhoalves 14y agoWhat's up with the awful bold fonts everywhere in the interface?
- panacea 14y agoHaven't downloaded yet, but apparently they use Helvetica Neue Light for some interface elements now. Perhaps you don't have that installed and it's defaulting to Bold?
- Derbasti 14y agoThat reminds me just how awful iTunes is. About a year ago, I switched to RDio/Spotify and I have not looked back. I do not have any local mp3s any more. Just some flacs for audio testing purposes. It has been months since I last used iTunes.
- sneak 14y agoI use iTunes to play my collection of lossless audio (downloaded as FLAC, converted to ALAC in m4a containers). I also like to DJ occasionally, or send albums to friends. Spotify allows for none of that, and has no lossless playback options. I'm not down on Spotify - I am a customer, as well. But don't pose it as the solution to actually possessing a music library. If all you do is listen to your music on earbuds, it's just fine. The moment you want to do more with it, you're stuck.
- Derbasti 14y agoIt is a solution for me.
- ludwigvan 14y agoI am pretty happy with Enqueue as a replacement for iTunes, it plays flac's too. http://www.enqueueapp.com/ http://www.enqueueapp.com/ (No affiliation)
- gavinlynch 14y agoGotta be honest: although the new UI is very much functional, it looks like absolute shit.
- sliverstorm 14y agoForm follows function, in my mind.
- gavinlynch 14y agoYah, just surprised they couldn't achieve both, as they often have. Won't stop me form using it.. Just not sure this change was worth the effort.
- eduardordm 14y agoCan someone convince me there is a non-stupid reason for having to close Xcode to make the upgrade?
- high5ths 14y agoNew version seems faster in some respects, but at least ridiculously slow in another: searching with the Column Browser open. I have a huge library--~63000 songs; I'm a musician--and although iTunes 10.7 search was quite reasonable, the new iTunes takes several seconds to do anything after typing a query. Even if I turn off "Search Entire Library" (so that it only searches the active screen, like Music) it is incredibly unresponsive. I'm talking ~6 seconds for the UI to update and the program to become responsive again. If I limit the search to only one field (e.g., Composer) it is faster, but still substantially slower than iTunes 10.7 (~2 seconds for the UI to update, compared to the previous results of nearly instant), and it makes the search much less useful. Closing the Column Browser speeds up filtering, though it's still slower than 10.7.
- dbrannan 14y agoPerhaps iTunes 11 needs to index your library over again before the speed improves?
- zerovox 14y agoI doubt it, it seems to be using the same plist format(essentially, a glorified xml file) as previous versions.
- hokkos 14y agothe plist is only for external app, internally it uses a sqlite.
- high5ths 14y agoPossibly... though Activity Monitor (or top) doesn't show anything suspicious. If I stop audio from playing, iTunes drops to about 4% CPU. (And mdworker doesn't appear to be working overtime either.) With the Column Browser open, searching in iTunes causes a leap to 100% CPU until the UI updates. Column Browser closed, searching causes a momentary leap, but not to 100%, and obviously it's over very quickly. There's clearly something up with the coding of the Column Browser.
- CoachRufus87 14y agoI look forward to checking this out though I find that with Spotify/Pandora, iCloud iOS backups, and the Podcast app on my iOS devices, I open up iTunes less and less these days. It's not even on my dock anymore.
- MartinCron 14y agoI still can't authorize more than 5 computers. Yes, 5 computers is a lot, but if you home/work computers for a couple with a shared account/library and a family room iMac, that's it.