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Apple said its next iteration of the now bloated and sluggish media hub, iTunes 11, would come first in October, then November. December is fast approaching and it’s still not here yet, but according to notes sent out to music producers, it should be here any day now, despite America being on Thanskgiving.
Something tells me that we’re not going to see it today, or tomorrow for that matter, but early next week is totally possible. We’ve seen all the new things Apple’s throwing into iTunes, but apparently we’ll be able to browse massive images of artists. Brilliant. Let’s just hope it sorts out the code base and makes it the lean-mean media machine it once was, and not the bloated mess it is today. You shouldn’t need a Mac Pro to get it to run right for goodness sake. [MacRumors via TUAW]
Goodness me, I can hardly contain my excitzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz.
I thought this one would be right up your alley
“right up your alley” that’s exactly where you can poke it
I LOVE iTunes match. Essentially like having all 80GB of my musi with me at all times. I know most of them are on Spotify, but being able to scroll through my artists is a nice bonus.
But Google Music does the same job for free right…? And without the unbelievable issues that iTunes Match throws up.
Is it going to be less bloated to run and take less time to sync my iDevice to? Oh sorry, Apple don’t have a wishful thinking department.
When was the last time you actually synced your iDevice though? Apart from restores, I don’t ever connect my iPhone to the Mac. Then, I have iTunes Match, so I guess it depends on if you’ve got to transfer music to it?
I charge my iPhone off of My MBP at work so sync on a fairly regular basis, also i rotate my music fairly regularly and as none of my music is bought from iTunes, iTunes Match is of no use to me.
iTunes Match takes your existing library, not just what you’ve bought from iTunes. It also gives you 256Kbps AACs of it all too, for the stuff it can match to the iTunes Music Store library. Think of it like a music amnesty — convert all your not-quite-so-legitimately acquired music into honest to goodness acquired from Apple DRM-free tracks
I think the last time I synced my iOS devices was April? Backups to iCloud and iTunes Match for music.
Did I read somewhere that iTunes 11 allows for streaming of purchased movies from iTunes rather than downloading? and if so will this be coming to iOS too? I know that iTunes 11 will use iCloud to sync your progress of a movie so you can pick up and go from a device, but streaming support would be nice too.
ooh, i shall have to investigate, and its all kept in the cloud is it?
All in the cloud, up to 25K songs.
on your iOS device you can browse the whole lot (if you choose) and start playing, it will stream as it downloads.
Once you start running out of space it will start removing tracks from your device in order of least listened to (this isn’t something thats advertised very well but I got into a scrap with iTunes support over it)
iOS 6.1 will let you manually swipe to delete stuff from the device (again, they took it out in 6.0)
to clarify: by “running out of space” I mean on the device itself, not the cloud.
(EDIT BUTTON!!! FOR CHRISTMAS?!)
As Sam pointed out, it doesn’t matter where your music came from (legal or illegal), Match will give you legal copies of it. I’ve got 70GB+ of music and only a handful of songs were brought from iTunes.
Cheers, i’ll deff look into it!!
Every day and I don’t have iTunes Match. No love for the Windows version of iTunes, it seems.
I’ll be interested to see if they can pull me back from Spotify, but I somehow doubt it.
Oh dear god please work properly and be easy to use. The current software is driving me nuts.
Whew, I thought it was never going to be released
The whole iTunes ecosystem and UX is a disaster and so I hope Apple focus on that, not just trying to sell more music by prettifying it. (Cool! spell checker didn’t flag up ‘prettifying’ – it’s a real word!) Anyway, the App Store on the iPad also needs to be re-done. The UX is terrible, with a vertical format that’s a pain to navigate and the whole experience is VERY slow, buggy and unresponsive. Not to mention, on OS X, iTunes is both the store and the media player, but on iOS, there is iTunes, the App Store and the music player. PLEASE consolidate the whole lot! Oh and the UX on the music player is totally different to the rest of iOS – it looks like a 1970s HiFi component control layout. Awful!
I’d rather wait an extra month and have it properly polished then have to wait for a 11.1 update to fix the annoying things.
This is a rebuild from the ground up, right?
Problem with iTunes is that it baloooned so much over the years to support video, then apps, then books, then other stuff. It became messy. Hopefully now they’ve cleared it all up a bit.
Oh, and in this version can I have a feature which will explain to me what that 3GB of “Other” is on my two week old 16GB iTouch 4? I only use it for music and podcasts, and have cleared out the apps I do have. Yet still nearly a quarter of my usable space is taken up by phantom content that I can’t see or find or delete.