Apple Announces Major iTunes Update Coming Next Month [Update: Version 10.7 Released Today]

[talmy]

I have a Windows computer I bought 10 years ago that is nothing but a music player. 6 years ago when I switched to Macs, I switched the MP3 player to iTunes. A few years ago it stopped running because iTunes got so bloated that it would no longer run on my system with 384MB of RAM. Now it has 768MB. That better be enough!

The irritating thing is I only want a music player. I don't need the iTunes Music, App, or Bookstore. I don't need the ability to play videos (heck, it only has a 40GB hard drive). I don't need to sync with iOS devices or the cloud.

[Paradoxally]

iTunes 11 will most likely be 10.7+ only, due to iCloud support (nothing new).

[baruch]

I use iTunes to build my radio shows. I wonder if this update will help or hinder. Lately Apple updates seem to be more con than pro.

[doctor-don]

Originally Posted by nvjusme

I tried to check for updates and it says my version is current at 10.6.3.

I guess I'll check again later

http://www.apple.com/itunes/download/

... if you have OSX 10.6.8 or higher.

----------

Originally Posted by talmy

I have a Windows computer I bought 10 years ago that is nothing but a music player. 6 years ago when I switched to Macs, I switched the MP3 player to iTunes. A few years ago it stopped running because iTunes got so bloated that it would no longer run on my system with 384MB of RAM. Now it has 768MB. That better be enough!

The irritating thing is I only want a music player. I don't need the iTunes Music, App, or Bookstore. I don't need the ability to play videos (heck, it only has a 40GB hard drive). I don't need to sync with iOS devices or the cloud.

That certainly is better than my 1996 Performa that NOW has a 4 GB hard drive and 20 MB of RAM - after I upgraded the original 250 MB hard drive and the 5 MB of RAM.

You do NOT have to upgrade your iTunes.

[SteveSwish]

Still says 10.6.3 is the current when I "Check for updates" on iTunes but download works. Im on Mountain Lion.

[moderngamenewb]

I'm surprised that iTunes is still not in the App Store. With Apple promoting the App Store and adding in OS X, Final Cut, iWork/iLife, etc, you'd think iTunes would be in the App Store as well

[Variant]

Originally Posted by SteveSwish

Still says 10.6.3 is the current when I "Check for updates" on iTunes but download works. Im on Mountain Lion.

Why are you guys so eager to download 10.7? Unless you somehow managed to get a new iPod/iPhone, you won't even notice a difference.

Originally Posted by moderngamenewb

I'm surprised that iTunes is still not in the App Store. With Apple promoting the App Store and adding in OS X, Final Cut, iWork/iLife, etc, you'd think iTunes would be in the App Store as well

I was wondering the same thing. Possibly they think that iTunes is a core app, whereas the apps you mentioned are extras/non-essentials. There aren't any "core" apps in the app store, though iTunes is probably the only one that updates independently from the OS itself.

Edit: Scratch that. Safari isn't in the app store either. I'm going to stick with my original theory about both being core apps.

[schaffinosx]

The new iTunes looks pretty nice, although I'm a little skeptical about the design for the upper-middle portion of the window. So long as iTunes continues to work as beautifully for me as it has over the last several years I'll be perfectly content.

[toshibauser]

Originally Posted by wrldwzrd89

Getting error -1100 when trying to check for updates in 10.8.1.

The operation couldn’t be completed. (NSURLErrorDomain error -1100.)

Same here. Why is this happening?

[MagnusVonMagnum]

Originally Posted by wikus

I wish they made a separate application for JUST music that isnt a memory hogging piece of crap

I among many others don't need support for movies, ebooks, an online app store, iphone, ipad, ipod, integration and all that other crap.

Just give us a nice, simple and quick application for managing and playing back MP3s! The only viable option is Enqueue but its not getting much updates and while Vox is an awesome small mp3 player, it lacks a proper library.

Why don't you look for a 3rd party MP3 player, then? I do need a universal player since it runs my whole house audio/video system. Frankly, there is nothing wrong with iTunes. It still runs just fine on my old PowerPC PowerMac from 2001 (updated to 1.8GHz). Compare that to all the web sites and web browsers out there that run like crap on older computers now due to inherently more garbage being loaded into pages that takes longer to render, etc.

Frankly, this update sounds like total crap offhand since I don't like the idea of the Grid interface being forced on me one bit. We already have a grid display option. WTF would they make that the only interface? I like the Album List view and I like the side-bar playlists and device listings as well. It's beyond my imagination why Apple insists on taking perfectly functional systems and SCREWING WITH THEM.

I know what it is. Some bright-eyed "genius" at Apple decided the ugly grid they're using for Apple TV Gen 2 & 3 is the greatest thing ever (ugly as hell) and they want it on everything. This is probably from the same guy that came up with Launch Pad.

Originally Posted by karsten

it appears cover flow is gone? i kind of liked that..

I liked how iTunes would remember the setting you set for any given playlist. If I had a single album of importance or a small category (like Tori Amos Live discs), I'd use Cover Flow. I'd use Album List with cover art for the main listing and I would use the Grid for exactly NOTHING. I *HATE* the grid display. It's slower to display, depends on the person recognizing album covers and doesn't let you look at a large list of things (especially alphabetical) with any kind of ease. Even the iPhone/iPod Touch has Artist, Album LISTS on it for easy navigation. Text is just plain faster in every regard. IF Grid really is the ONLY view in this new iTunes, Apple has REALLY shot themselves in the foot.

It's just seems like since Steve died, they WANT to fail once again and prove it every time they do some bonehead maneuver like changing dock connectors for the hell of it (the iOS devices are thin enough for god's sake!), putting out a JOKE of a Mac Pro "update", no time tables for iMacs or Mac Minis with Sandy Bridge and USB3 (I'm starting to wonder if I even want a Mac Mini for my whole house server if this sort of thing is the interface I'm going to be stuck with), putting out "dongles" galore for the new Retina Macbook Pro (since it has hardly ANY on-board connectors which defeats the point of portability and not having to carry tons of crap around) and generally ignoring their computer lines most of the time to concentrate on phones and tablets. Apple is getting less innovative and more predictable every day. Get ready for iPhone V35! It's slightly faster, slightly longer and all your old software won't work on it and the new software won't work on your old iPhone! Ugh....

Originally Posted by Lynn Belvedere

iTunes is like 10 years old. Are you seriously freaking out because 10 year old software was updated?

No we're freaking out because they're screwing with something that has been relatively stable for many years now and giving us even LESS flexibility than before. Apple was never big on OPTIONS, but now they seem to be intent on shoving ONE method down our throats for EVERYTHING. I need a good system to run my whole house system. iTunes was perfectly adequate for this function and despite what some seem to think, it's VERY EASY to use. Now it's just going to be a royal PITA. Lists are good for looking at data. Album covers are not. And what about all those albums you imported yourself that don't have album art and you didn't bother to manually retrieve the covers? You're going to have a ton of "?" marks on your screen and not much else whereas it doesn't matter one bit with a LIST.

Originally Posted by Lynn Belvedere

I'll let you in on a little secret...

iTunes has become a complete joke of a software application. It is an antiquated, bloated mess and was badly in need of updating. iTunes is literally the worst thing Apple is associated with. It's even worse than their earbuds.

Trying to improve the absolute worst thing they provide is a good thing. It was in desperate need of a redesign.

I have NO freaking clue what all you people who keep talking about "bloated" iTunes are talking about. The thing runs fine on my ancient PowerMac which is like 1/25th the speed of even the low-end Macs coming out. HTF is THAT "bloated" ??? Honestly, I don't think most of you have a clue what you're talking about. It's a total media manager. Apple TV handles all those forms of media. Why in the world would I want to dumb iTunes down to a simple MP3 player just because some of you can't tell a movies button from a music button?

[antoniojg25]

why is that when i'm tring to update to the 10.7 release is giving an error?

[Obi-Wan Kubrick]

I'm pretty sure iTunes peaked around version 7 in 206 with Cover Flow

[sectime]

Originally Posted by talmy

I have a Windows computer I bought 10 years ago that is nothing but a music player. 6 years ago when I switched to Macs, I switched the MP3 player to iTunes. A few years ago it stopped running because iTunes got so bloated that it would no longer run on my system with 384MB of RAM. Now it has 768MB. That better be enough!

The irritating thing is I only want a music player. I don't need the iTunes Music, App, or Bookstore. I don't need the ability to play videos (heck, it only has a 40GB hard drive). I don't need to sync with iOS devices or the cloud.

Buy a refurb Ipod comes to mind.

[Doc69]

I sure hope it's faster and more responsive than the current version.

Having 60K songs in lossless plus podcasts and video, I also hope they don't make it so simple that it will be harder to find stuff and get a good overview of a large library. I'm hopeful, but considering Apple's history of often completely changing things, many times lately for the worse and without any regard for the users, I'm very worried as I have a 10 year investment in ratings and playlists.

[macs4nw]

Originally Posted by Porco

The first screenshot I saw scared me a lot, because it looked like the terrible iPad music app. Hopefully they buried features rather than threw them out altogether.
I might be in the minority, but iTunes has always worked fine for me most of the time…

Originally Posted by StephenCampbell

Ughhh...... noo!!! Why!??? I like the classic iTunes layout just fine thank you very much. Apple is digging themselves into a grave through their obsession with constantly changing things. We'll be able to have the list view for now, but down the road it won't be an option anymore.

Originally Posted by karsten

it appears cover flow is gone? i kind of liked that..

Originally Posted by NATO

Not happy at all with the way they've made iTunes like the iPad app, where browsing by artist is done by a grid of album art squares. It's so clumsy compared to a nice list where you can just scroll down by name. I really hope the standard column browser is still included otherwise I'll just hold on to the current version.

Not sure about the NEW iTunes either; I'm pretty happy with it as it is right now. Also there appears to be no more 'progress' bar in the mini-player which I use a lot while doing other things. When this comes out by the end of October, I'm going to be test-driving it extensively in the store before deciding to upgrade.

[johndoe123abc]

Is no one else horrified by that LCD center section? (where the current song information is displayed)

It's edges are so sharp. Looks nasty. Otherwise I think the rest of the GUI is great.

[decafjava]

Originally Posted by MagnusVonMagnum

No we're freaking out because they're screwing with something that has been relatively stable for many years now and giving us even LESS flexibility than before. Apple was never big on OPTIONS, but now they seem to be intent on shoving ONE method down our throats for EVERYTHING. I need a good system to run my whole house system. iTunes was perfectly adequate for this function and despite what some seem to think, it's VERY EASY to use. Now it's just going to be a royal PITA. Lists are good for looking at data. Album covers are not. And what about all those albums you imported yourself that don't have album art and you didn't bother to manually retrieve the covers? You're going to have a ton of "?" marks on your screen and not much else whereas it doesn't matter one bit with a LIST.

Nothing I've read states that the list view is gone-this is probably just a option? I hope.

Agree with you that it is not as "bloated" as people say.

What I really want is to fix nested smart playlists. I'd like for them to work properly on ios devices (live update on the device themselves) but would love for them to work on itunes in the cloud. I have an iphone 4 34 GB and my current music library is just 2 GB over-so I manage the music content with nested playlists. Even if I had the 64 GB 4s or 5 (which I am planning to get when I'm elegible for upgrade next year) I still want to keep space for apps, photos and games and using nested playlists on the clould would work for me.

[Colpeas]

iTunes is now Intel-only. Seriously, Apple? Now I am truly pissed as I have all my music and such stuff stored on a G5 tower...

[macs4nw]

Originally Posted by Lynn Belvedere

....iTunes has become a complete joke of a software application. It is an antiquated, bloated mess and was badly in need of updating. iTunes is literally the worst thing Apple is associated with.

Whoa; I beg to differ!

Originally Posted by Lynn Belvedere

....Trying to improve the absolute worst thing they provide is a good thing. It was in desperate need of a redesign.

I'll bet you a mortgage payment MILLIONS will disagree with you on this.

[haravikk]

So you know that article only a few days ago about the design rift at Apple… here's the folks to blame for it and back with more custom widgets that look nothing like the rest of Mac OS!

Seriously, are they now just doing it because it's traditional or something? Where's an iTunes version that looks like a Mac app? Pretty please?


There's also no mention of performance, which iTunes has been steadily getting worse and worse at with every version; when literally everything interferes with music playback on an 8-core machine (including, crucially, iPod syncing) then there's something really wrong as there's these little things called "threads" that have been around for a while now…

Handling of multi-media has been awful for a long time now too; ever since the old option for double-click to open a video disappeared (many, many versions ago) it was a huge loss for such a tiny, no-brainer of a feature. And anyone that's tried importing TV shows or movies into iTunes will know from hard experience that it's a non-starter; even if you import files in exactly the same format iTunes uses, and tag them correctly, they still won't always show up in the right place. Last I checked setting a movie file to type "TV Show" is supposed to make it show up in TV shows, but hey, what do I know, right? Importing any media needs to be just as easy as importing music, and even that's not that great as there's no option to automatically convert file formats if you want to, nor support for half of the most common music formats such as FLAC and OGG.

Also, iTunes is not a browser; using the iTunes store is possibly the last thing I want to do in iTunes, as it's just god-awful as a browser, and almost unreservedly so! All the shortcuts I use in Safari do something different when browsing in iTunes; it's a really huge step back when I actually have to use all the interface widgets to actually get anywhere while browsing the web in an application that simply isn't a web-browser.

While it's sort of an OS issue, ditching Front Row, which was basically an alternate remote-friendly interface for iTunes so technically an iTunes feature anyway, still irks me. All my content is in iTunes, I want a simple media view suitable for a Mac Mini hooked up to a TV. I mean, why even have an HDMI port on the Mac Mini if not to be able to hook it up to a TV and use it like a beefed up Apple TV if you want to? It's not like it should take all that much to maintain Front Row; just use the same codebase as the Apple TV or something, or shove a suitable interface directly into iTunes, either way just give me some way of using iTunes on a TV that doesn't suck balls. It's really stupid when the best experience of a Mac Mini with TV connected is to boot into a Windows or Linux media centre OS!


I dunno; I have to remain pessimistic about the whole thing as there hasn't been a single good update to iTunes since version 3 or 4, and that's a lot of historical evidence that this one will be just as bad. I'd love to be pleasantly surprised, but the iTunes team has proven itself adept at talking a bunch of hot-air while pushing increasingly bad versions of an already bloated and sub-par music player; I remember when iTunes was actually a music player, that was pretty sweet wasn't it? I wouldn't use it at all if not for my iDevices, and even then it's easily the worst part of the user-experience when it comes to iOS device use.

[potatis]

where to download 10.6.3 or whatever the last Leopard version is?

[grubworth]

I was rather peed at looking at the new itunes, but if you watch the keynote's demo of itunes 11, you really get an idea of what they have done, and I must say I think this will be EASIER to navigate around my large library with itunes 11.

I just hope their is some way to organize from date added > in album order!

Watch the keynote if you haven't, you see much more of itunes 11 than on Apples website atm.

[Glassed Silver]

Originally Posted by jacg

I know there are iTunes haters but I consider myself someone who uses many of the deeper features on a daily basis. Album view was unveiled years ago and I've never used it since. I hope they don't use this 'new look' as a smokescreen for reduced functionality.

For example, QuickTime 7 -> QuickTime X.

Have these thumbs up, good Sir!

Glassed Silver:mac

[milo]

Originally Posted by wankey

You don't? Time to upgrade buddy.

First, many macs can't be upgraded to 4 or 8 gigs.

Second, having to upgrade a mac to 4 gigs just for an mp3 player is flat out sad.

Originally Posted by StephenCampbell

Don't use iTunes Match.

I'm headed that way, but since the first year is already paid for I'm going to see if they improve it. I suspect once they near the first subscriptions expiring they may feel more of an incentive so they get customers to renew. Can't agree with the blanket whining about everything Apple has done for the past seven years.

Originally Posted by turtlez

it's not a forced upgrade mate.

It is for anyone looking at a new iPhone or iPod. Kind of a dumb move on Apple's part since that probably hurts phone sales more than it helps mac sales.

Originally Posted by Paradoxally

iTunes 11 will most likely be 10.7+ only, due to iCloud support (nothing new).

Possible though iTunes already includes Match and other iCloud features yet still runs on 10.6.8.

Originally Posted by MagnusVonMagnum

I have NO freaking clue what all you people who keep talking about "bloated" iTunes are talking about.

Let me fix that for you...

Originally Posted by MagnusVonMagnum

I have NO freaking clue

Much better.

[talmy]

Originally Posted by sectime

Buy a refurb Ipod comes to mind.

Makes sense if I were starting over. However Windows Computer = free. Refurb iPod ≠ free.