Although I presume most of you consider yourselves to be technology fans, it seems like the majority of us are particularly drawn in by hardware, as opposed to software. While it’s the devices that invariably make the headlines, the associated applications play a huge part in their success, and in terms of Apple-designed devices, the iTunes desktop app has played a pivotal role in its success.
As we (await)-(take in) the news of the iPhone 5, it’s quite easy to skip the rather significant announcement of iTunes 11, but as updates to the famed music / content hub go, this is easily one of the most significant.
The new version of iTunes has an edge-to-edge interface, which looks beautiful to say the least. Albums and artist view has gotten a significant refresh, in short, the new iTunes somewhat resembles it’s iPad counterpart.
Upon clicking an album which you might want to listen to, you get an expanded view of the the album, listing down the songs contained inside it. Pretty neat stuff.
The usual stuff is there, you can browse the library by artist, albums, genre etc. But the fun doesn’t end there, the artist can now share images with you in your library.
The new iTunes also offers split-screen view, so you can drag and drop your songs to your playlists while listening to your music like a champ.
iTunes also features a new mini-player mode, which shrinks the whole player window down and just shows the name of the currently playing song, album name etc. All the little bits which you’d expect to be on-screen to keep you updated on what is playing.
The iTunes Store is a lot more integrated into the software than we’ve been used to. Hitherto, what we’ve seen within iTunes is a glorified Web browser, flitting through content available online already. Similarly to Spotify for those familiar, everything will work a lot more harmoniously, and the experience will be an altogether much more immersive and engaging one.
OS X Mountain Lion has only taken its baby steps into the world of computing, and having already made a pretty decent impression on Mac users far and wide, will see some of its new quirks utilized by iTunes.
All in all, it’s a very impressive update by Apple, and although the majority of the changes are under the hood, the performance enhancements render iTunes 11 a worthy supplement to the iPhone 5 and iOS 6.
Running through the new features quickly: it has a dramatically simplified design, it has iCloud built right in, has a new mini player mode, and features the whole new redesigned iTunes Store.
The all new iTunes will be available sometime in October this year.
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