|
||||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
||||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
||||
More Apple Coverage on AA Check out our review of the new iPod Nano
|
Every time I've logged on to iTunes I've never thought. 'That looks lame.' Or 'What a terrible design!" It's always been just nature to log on and get songs, movies, and apps. With iTunes 9 Everything has been revamped to look better, but a few big features have been added too. Basically the best digital music retailer just got better. Home Sharing Home sharing could be done easily without this feature inside of iTunes. You've just got to know how to network things. It's not that difficult and in a lot of ways this might mess up some preexisting setups with multiple instances of files and use of a lot of bandwidth copying things across a network. That's the downside about iTunes new Home Sharing feature. The upside is for people who don't know how to network files and share media in their household, this makes that incredibly easy. It also allows for purchases to be automatically downloaded on multiple machines (with limitations of course) which makes that a Home Sharing a plus. This feature is a solid feature but some people are going to be torn as to how big of an add on this really is. Medium to intermediate users of digital media are going to be thrilled. Advanced users are probably just going to be in the meh... category or the 'bout time' category. iTunes' New Look There's good and bad to this too. It's good because it looks awesome, but there's definitely an objective way to look at the design of the front page. There's a lot of content there now- without the use of a lot of the buttons that were there that content has been pushed to the front page. And while, yes the old front page was pretty full. iTunes 9's front page is chuck-full of stuff. It's great for labels and studios looking for placement because they get more placement. But it's also bad because they're competing against more. It's great for consumers because there's more right in front of them to choose from, but it's bad for them because they might get something that's bad just because it's on the front page of iTunes. Like I've said. That's a push- but I like the polished and updated look of the program and the sliders on top of the front page are definitely cool. iTunes LP This is amazing. This goes under the WOW category of the new iTunes. iTunes LP is awesome. In a lot of ways it's like purchasing an LP or an old vinyl because you get so much artwork and credits and everything else to go along with it. But it's more expansive than that. A big instance is the new Dave Matthews Band album "Big Whiskey and the GrooGrux King" you get a ton of artwork that Dave drew himself- you get basically a documentary movie alongside of the album. You get the music video of "Funny the Way it Is." You also get a few other goodies too. I have all of my dad's old vinyl and I love it, but there was nothing that cool in my dad's old vinyl. The other cool thing about iTunes LP is how it's integrated into iTunes. It's kind of like iCD and that stuff back in the day. The CDs where you would put an album in your computer and a bunch of terrible software with a decent interface would run. Here you skip the terrible software, have an excellent interface, and you get more features than you could have dreamed with some of that old content. I'm a big huge fan of iTunes LP and I can't wait until every record of note comes out in this fashion. I will forever love physical product and physical albums, but if anything digital has a chance of completely getting rid of physical product it's iTunes LP. The biggest reason with that is because it's warm enough and friendly enough to do so. iTunes LP is amazing. iTunes Extras Unlike iTunes LP this kind of gets a meh... sure it's cool to get access to some bonus features and things like that but internet connections aren't to the point to where you can get an HD movie and several features downloaded in thirty seconds. (Most peoples' connections aren't there yet anyway.) So until that medium meets this service it's not going to be that important. It's still kind of cool to get some extra features to go alongside of a movie and it's integrated like a DVD menu inside of iTunes, so that's cool too, but for now this is a wash as well. It's impressive because it's there, it's not because most people aren't going to find as many uses for this as they will a DVD or a Blu-Ray combo pack. They're just not. Basically iTunes is ahead of their time on this one. When the time comes that they have tons of exclusive content that's crazy cool- that's when people will flock to this. Right now it's just the eight billion teenage girls and young women obsessed with Twilight and anything related to the movie that are going to find this the most useful. Genius Playlists I remain a huge fan of Genius. I got into this a few months ago when I was introduced to this and I haven't stopped using it. Basically you send data off on your library to Apple and iTunes to set up Genius. Once you have that set up you can right click a song you like and choose 'Start Genius' from there a big playlist of songs that are like the song you choose and sound good with that song are added into a playlist of 25,50,75, or 100. Basically it's like having a really good music director/program director of a radio station at your finger tips. It's good stuff. Overall I might seem torn on a few of the new features with iTunes but that doesn't mean I'm not a fan of the new version of the program because I definitely am. iTunes LP is downright amazing, iTunes Extra is cool, Home Sharing has lots of perks, and Genius is... genius. Overall iTunes 9.0 is a substantial update for the program and once you update it and get into the program you're going to love it.
|
|||
|
Site Map |
Facebook |
Twitter |
Last.fm | Donate
|
Privacy
Statement |
Advertise |
Contact Us
|