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iTunes 9 has arrived, sporting several new tech features that make it worth your time to learn to use.
If you use an iPhone, you can now use iTunes to arrange the apps for your iPhone home screen. This new feature is the one that has many users excited. Here's Miraz from MacTips explaining Use iTunes to arrange apps on your iPhone screen. This article gives the directions in text and as a video. Here's the video; refer to the article if you want to see the steps listed in writing.
Apple is consolidating many features in iTunes that are intended to help you with all your digital media. It stores music, TV shows, movies, podcasts, audio books, iTunes U lectures and makes all those items available to you on your own computer, your TV, or on any connected computer on your home network. Apple recently dropped the price of the Apple TV to only about $100, according to Christina Warren at Mashable. Setting everything up in your home takes a bit of time, but the results are pretty amazing.
One part of setting up is the new Sharing feature. The What's new in iTunes 9 page mentions Sharing:
Home Sharing helps you manage your family”s iTunes collection between computers in your home.
Granny Joan's Hitek Lady Blog found the process of sharing to be a bit confusing, and wrote some helpful directions on Home Sharing iTunes 9.
I learned how to use the 'Home Sharing' option, available in iTunes 9 and thought I would share this information, as it was very confusing to setup for use with two different people on the same network that had two separate login accounts for iTunes Apple Store.
Granny Joan has screen shots to help you complete the sharing steps.
Simple Tech Guru also wrote about the sharing in iTunes 9 in iTunes 9: How to Set up Home Sharing.
Finally, I can share my tunes and movies with my family and they can share their tunes with me. I mean I can actually take the movies and music that are on my family’s computers and put them into MY iTunes to play when I want. My son has great taste in music and movies so I’m happy to get the benefit of the long hours of his discoveries of music. This has been made possible because iTunes 9 has “home sharing.”
In the past, if each person chose to “share” their iTunes Library, you could listen to their music, but the music and movies lived in the other person’s iTunes library. You could only listen if they had their computer turned on and running iTunes. Now, members of the same household that want to share (actually exchange) music and movies can. Guess it’s all part of the loosening of DRM so that you can actually listen to music and watch movies where you want to view or hear it.
iTunes 9 has a new column browser, which I rather like. Choose View > Column Browser when you are in your library. Once you have it showing, you can choose whether you want to view genres, albums, artists or some other view options.
With the column browser activated, you see a quick way to navigate your library. Here you see a column showing artists, which I can navigate much more quickly than by scrolling through my entire library to find a tune I want to hear.
Apple is attempting to catch up with social media sharing with iTunes 9 by making possible to share what you are doing with iTunes on Twitter and Facebook. Tech Crunch reported in iTunes Connects with Facebook and Twitter that the social networking functions are still at a rudimentary level.
iTunes 9 is now live for download and we’ve just tried out the new sharing functionality for ourselves. In short, it’s quite basic at this point. On Twitter a shared item includes the song title, artist, an #iTunes hashtag, and a link to the iTunes store (no surprise there). But even Facebook’s shared item is pretty basic — unlike what you see when you share a song through Lala or similar apps, which let you stream song excerpts or the entire song from an embedded player, with iTunes your friends will only see a song’s album cover. If they want to hear
