iTunes 9 looks exciting for a couple of reasons. One is the ability to share libraries across computers. This has become a major annoyance, because I have a few computers to act as servers and the current iTunes views other computers’ libraries as if all the content were songs in one long list. The other day we played an episode of a TV show and after it finished the next “track” played and we got random music. This was really a silly constraint. Other computers now show the nice clean delineated Movies, Music, TV, etc. that see on every iTunes. Maybe this signals something about the AppleTV. Certainly, adds to a shared media server type home environment. I wish the really big, old, G4 file server, which runs 10.3 could run this version. But maybe it can.
The other interesting item is the expanded Genius functionality. Not sure how well it will work, but it seems they have acquired a massive amount of data on people’s songs (54 billion).
Some stuff is kind of dumb. The LP functionality. Really? I’m supposed to want text and graphics that record labels stopped making 25+ years ago when we moved to tape. Uh, yeah, I’ve so been missing album covers and I would never have thought of going to the internet to look for that kind of stuff, because I’m so stupid.
And the sync by genre and artist functionality. What the? I thought Apple got it with the Genius feature. Show me music I like. Who cares who wrote it, sung it, or how it was arbitrarily classified. Most of my songs are ripped from a Windows machine anyway. There is no genre info on a lot of them and many are just wrong. Sync by playlist was fine. The rest just adds more complexity.