Unsung features in iTunes 9

Jake Widman
Tuesday, 15 September 2009 01:17

Your IT - Entertainment

The latest version of iTunes, released last week, sports a redesigned iTunes Store, wish lists, and other new buying features. But iTunes 9 also adds some welcome, little-noticed new capabilities to its basic functions as a personal media manager.

At last week's Apple event introducing the new version of iTunes (as well as the new iPod lineup), Steve Jobs focused on the changes to the iTunes Store.

The Store has a revamped, cleaned-up new interface and new buying options, most notably the iTunes LP format for some albums, which includes liner notes, video, and other inducements to buy a whole album rather than individual tracks.

Jobs also mentioned a couple of new enhancements to iTunes' role as a media organizer and player. One, Home Sharing, enables the copying of song files -- not just streaming the music -- among authorized computers on a network.

Another is Genius Mixes, an extension of the existing Genius Playlists (introduced in iTunes 8) that assemble 25- to 100-song playlists of songs that go together with a chosen "seed" song. Genius Mixes do a similar thing automatically, searching your library to create several much larger groupings of songs.

For example, I ended up with 12 Mixes: four "Alternative," three "Rock," two "Country," one "Soul," one "Jazz," and one "Pop."

iTunes 9 creates Genius Mixes for you. (Click for larger image.)

The Mixes screen shows a sample of the album covers that go into each mix, and a description at the bottom lists two or three of the acts that the mix is based on. But there's no way to see the complete list of songs in a mix or to choose a particular song to start with.

Tour of new iTunes features continues on Page 2.