Image courtesy of Apple, Inc.

When Apple released iTunes 9 on September 9th, 2009, they were trying to please any audiophile and this update was not a disappointment to Apple fans. iTunes 9 has many new features including new network sharing configurations, album view, and the new Genius Mixes. So let’s dive deeper into the features of this latest update.

The first thing you will notice when iTunes is finished installing is the new shade of the window. They changed the color to a lighter shade of gray that illuminates your screen. After opening it up it re-verifies your library by running an update on your files. Depending on the size of your library, this process could take a few moments to several minutes. Since I have a large collection of tracks, it took my computer several minutes. I didn’t notice anything new about my library after that update – I imagine it probably got a few of my album covers or updated some of the info in my library and possibly grabbed some new songs that may have been scattered across my hard drive.

When the library update is complete the new welcome screen shows up. Most people tend to skip this part and dig right into the application, but I believe it’s worth a look. It helped me figure out a bunch of new features that might have been otherwise unnoticed (I will mention some of those later). From the welcome screen, I found there were several features that helped with the use of iTunes more efficiently:

Application Changes

Starting with the new design features within the application, you might notice the tiny image of a house on the side bar that allows you to setup a network share on your library. This is neat because not only can you connect to other computers in your house on the same network share, but it offers abilities that are better than just sharing. You can change the view on this network share with other computers and select the option “Not on my computer” and drag and drop all the songs into your own library. Being able to drag and drop files from computer to computer is an amazing feature if you and your spouse/girlfriend like a lot of the same music but you don’t feel like copying everything over to your library and having duplicate items. This feature can also help you backup your library because if one computer goes down, the other computer will have copies of the songs as well. This feature was one of my favorites.

Go to Store and select “Update Genius” and you’ll get a new icon called “Genius Mixes” which is an awesome feature to try out. The Genius Mixes are 12 different mixes based off your library that you can listen to that the Genius connects together. These mixes are completely random sets of songs that can be added to your iPod and iPhone. It only makes the mix titles once but iTunes may change them if your library changes drastically enough.

Another option available inside with the new update is called the “Column Browser”. The Column Browser option is helpful if you have ever had to scroll through your library to find an artist that you wanted or if you’re looking for a certain genre of music. You can turn this feature on by going to View and selecting “Show Column Browser” you can change the column by going to View and selecting the “Column Browser” and then selecting the column you desire to scroll through.

iTunes Store

There are some new features to be found inside of the iTunes Store as well. The iTunes Store has added the Album View that opens up a window of the Album to sample other songs inside of the album that doesn’t force you to navigate way from your current page. They also added this feature for movies as well that lets you preview of the video or the trailer of the movie. Apple has also added new ways to share albums such as gifting an album or a song and being able to share music with your friends on Twitter or Facebook.

iPod/iPhone Update

Let’s move into some of the new features found in the iPod/iPhone update. One new option is you can add your Genius Mixes now to your iPhone. This is neat but beware that these mixes take a large amount of space. Another musical addition to the device update is the option to fill your device’s space with music. This feature is helpful because you can randomly fill the extra space with music and don’t have to decide all the artists you want on your iPod or iPhone.
The update has also allowed you to organize your device applications easier using the new application interface on iTunes. This lets you easily drag an application from one tab to another without having to reorganize all the other applications along the way. This feature is way better than drag and dropping icons from screen to screen, however, this isn’t as nice of an interface as Movement but it allows you to get the job done faster without having to jailbreak your device, plus it’s available on all iTunes supported OS platforms.

Negative Review from others

I have had only one issue with the new update that was disappointing to me – the install time. It took about 15 minutes to install. Other than that I haven’t had any issues with the new update. Keep in mind that I am running this on Vista 64-bit with 4 Gigs of RAM but found that iTunes takes about 4% of my RAM to run and varies on the amount of CPU usage. What I have heard is that some people are having difficulty with how much RAM it takes up and how much CPU processing it uses. I have only heard this complaint from other Vista users, so this may be an issue limited to Windows Vista.

theindywilsons : Currently doing youth ministry for his church Community Christian Fellowship, loves learning about great ways technology can impact peoples lives for communication.