iPhones 8 rolled out, and it’s different. Not terribly different, but under the hood, no doubt changed a lot.
New Stuff
Genius
The Genius Sidebar, where you can “make playlists from songs in your library that go great together” is cool, I guess. The best part, at least from Apple’s point of view, is that it will “recommend songs from the iTunes Store that you don’t already have”.
Fact is, it only is able to access data collected by human surveys. It can’t listen to the music… it looks for matches in metadata. Change the genres, song titles etc, Genius will be confused.
One gripe. To make the sidebar appear/disappear, you click on an arrow which looks a lot like the forward or reverse arrow button for slideshows. Not as intuitive as it could be.
I’ll play with it, when I have time to spare. Not excited about it, but will report back.
HD TV shows
For $2.99 you can buy your fav TV episodes in HD. You can even buy a Season Pass, and get ‘em all. iTunes acts as the HD player, and you get an iPod-ready version optimized for the small screen.
More fun stuff
You can change podcast settings from the default… how many episodes downloaded and kept. Previously only global changes were possible.
Grid view is pretty cool… The new visualizer is very cool.
If you have an iPhone, disable automatic syncing in Preferences (Devices). You can also see previous backups, and delete them if you want to. I’d be a little careful with this option, until you are sure you really, really want to lose the backup.
Prefs (Devices) is also the place you can look for remote speakers connected with AirTunes, disable iTunes volume control for remote speakers, allow iTunes control from remote speakers and look for iPhone and iPod Touch remotes.
Screen Reader friendly
iTunes 8 is now screen reader friendly. Macs and PC users can manage their library using VoiceOver in Leopard, or Window-Eyes in XP and Vista. You can do your purchasing and downloading with your screen reader as well.
Problems?
Typically, people have had issues with the new release. MacFixIt has a number of articles with fixes for various problems, but my guess is that the number of people with these problems is small. If you do have any difficulty with iTunes 8, definitely go to MacFixit and MacInTouch and check them out.
I would love to hear from anyone who wants to share their experience of the new iTunes.
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