I Mead Mine

iTunes 8.1 in 60 seconds

Posted on 12. Mar, 2009 by Rob in Apple, Computing, Gadgets, Hi-Fi and AV, Technology

What to love and hate about the new version of iTunes so far

First of all, let’s take a quick look at what Apple says is new. Fire up the iTunes 8.1 installer and you’re greeted with this:

Wow – we’re immediately off to a brilliant start. iTunes 8.1 now starts up in 5 seconds on my venerable Power Mac G5, whereas I used to have to wait 20 seconds or so before. None too shabby for a 180GB library. Loading up the iTunes Store still takes an age though… that’s probably down to my broadband connection than anything else.

No real changes to either the iTunes Store or iTunes App Store, unless I’m missing something – a colour change, maybe?:

Enter the Genius

The Genius ‘atom’ symbol has moved from iTunes 8’s display window at the top, and now has its own dedicated button at the bottom right, right next to the Genius sidebar button. Makes sense.

Clicking it forces the Genius to sync with the iTunes Store, something which can be a very slow process. No speed improvements here.

The Sidebar is now supposed to makes Movie and TV Show recommendation as well as ones for music recommendations, but it’s not working right now – I get a ‘ temporarily unavailable’ message:

The old Party Shuffle has now been replaced by iTunes DJ, which enables friends to ‘vote’ for songs using the Apple Remote application on an iPhone or iPod touch:

The Settings menu gives them access, but anyone who’s used Party Shuffle before will be familiar everything else iTunes DJ does. It’s a tidying up, rather than anything revolutionary:

And finally… iTunes Plus audio encodes now have their own dedicated setting in Preferences > General > Import Settings, where it joins High Quality Audio, Podcast and Custom. There’s nothing really new here – 256kbps AAC using Variable Bit Rate encoding was already available in the Custom settings. It’s good to have a dedicated drop-down menu option though.

That’s it for now! The massive speed boost is by far and and away the best thing about iTunes 8.1 so far – and that augurs well for Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard, which is also getting juiced up.

Related posts:

1. iTunes 8.1 imminent, big changes planned
2. New iTunes sales record: 1 billion songs in just 8 months
3. Fox to offer movie downloads on iTunes?
4. iTunes movie downloads: over-priced, over-hyped and over here?
5. 10 ways Apple could improve iTunes 8

Tags: audio, ipod, itunes, mac os x, snow leopard