Apple has officially released iTunes 11. The new iTunes features a simplified player, redesigned Store, and new iCloud features. A considerably redesigned interface focuses on edge-to-edge designs for albums, movies, and TV shows in the iTunes library, and personal recommendations are available when users click In the Store, which has similarly been simplified visually. Purchases in iCloud now appear inside your iTunes library, and can be played directly from iCloud or downloaded as a copy to sync to a device or play offline. Playback syncing is also a possibility with iCloud, which remembers where you left off in a movie or TV show; iTunes will now continue playing right where you left off, no matter what device you use.
iTunes 11 features Up Next, a simple way to see which songs are playing next. Up Next enables users to reorder, add, or skip songs at any point. The new, smaller MiniPlayer includes album art, adds Up Next, and makes searching easier. Apple is also boasting improved search within iTunes, as instant results from your library pop up as you type in the search field. For Mac, iTunes 11 is being updated through the Mac App Store, an iTunes first. Expect some initial downloading time to be followed by behind-the-scenes hard drive grinding as your library is updated in the background after installation.
Notably, the Mac requirements for iTunes 11 are a computer with an Intel Core processor and 512MB of RAM, OS X version 10.6.8 or later, 400MB of available disk space, and a broadband Internet connection; Safari is no longer listed as a required item for iTunes. Windows system requirements are a PC with a 1 GHz Intel or AMD processor and 512 MB of RAM, Windows XP SP2/Vista/7/8, 400 MB of available disk space, and a broadband Internet connection, up from 250MB required for the prior PC version.
24 comments
I can’t seem to find a place to download this for the PC. Maybe it just isn’t out for PC yet?
same issue here. Itunes update performed and it says, 10 is the current version…hmm
Just go to the iTunes section on Apple website and download the software and then install it. It installs much quicker than previous version of iTunes and seems lighter and faster.
I liked the new look. Apparently the bigger changes were in the software engine – iTunes had actually become a Frankenstein with all the updates over the years. Now it was probably redesigned from scratch to include all the features that were created over the years, but in a smarter way. It feels lighter and faster.
I only miss the bigger album artwork that could be displayed on the lower left corner while the music was played – I wish they would bring the feature back.
Yep, definitely not out for the PC.
Whenever it comes, I am prepared, have a copy of the 10.7.0.21 version and will make a fresh back up of the .itl and associated files right before I install this.
And if I can’t turn off the cloud features, the backup will go right back on my machine and I’ll find another product when I can no longer use 10.7. Four different people make purchases on my Apple ID, the very last thing I ever want to see is the cloud stuff in *my* library.
It’s been a long time since any new feature of iTunes was actually useful or used by me. Think the last real update was when they introduced rule nesting for smartlists, everything since then has been a bunch of useless garbage that I just turn off asap.
“I only miss the bigger album artwork that could be displayed on the lower left corner while the music was played – I wish they would bring the feature back.”
So they removed the ONLY instance of using large artwork properly in the entire app, genius.
Code Monkey: album artwork can still be displayed, even in bigger format (there’s an option for fitting the whole screen), by clicking on the album cover in the player panel. The problem is that it opens on a separate window.
It definitely IS available for PC and has been for hours. You have to do the Apple Software Update.
ABORT! ABORT!
Not ready. Can’t view grid listing. Can’t advance to next or previous when reading track info. Option to uncheck a track but no check boxes in sight. Can’t move column browser to top. Can’t change displayed info options.
FOUND GRID VIEW! Click on “Songs” button at the top of the list. Not intuitive at all but at least it’s there.
Not a fan so far. I like to use the grid view but appreciate the album artwork I can see now both in the corner as well as the cover flow. I do not want to view my library by album and now apparently that is the only way I can appreciate the album art. Step back unless I am missing something.
I love the new remote, seems a lot quicker, even connecting to my main itunes library which I’ve left at 10.7 for the time being.
The main reason is I can’t seem to see any reference to iTunes DJ, which is my main method of playing music throughout my house, which also gives my guest the option of adding songs to the queue, I’m sad to see this go. 🙁
Remote still sees it, but no longer lets you “request” a song.
@6: I believe you missed my emphasis on proper. I’m sure there are plenty of ways of seeing artwork, they’re just all crap compare to the simplicity of the design that’s been working for nigh on a decade.
@7: If you have to use their “screws it up 2 out of 3 installs and you can only fix it by downloading the full version” software updater to get it then it is NOT available, and as of nearly 9PM, it is NOT available for the PC.
Well, installed it in spite of my hatred of their updater; could they have spent any more effort in making it harder to do anything?
Discovered that the side panel is still there (ctrl-s), just hidden, file menu is still there (ctrl-b), just hidden, you can sort albums by year, just have to go into view options (doubly hidden unless you’ve discovered the hidden file menu bar) for every category, realized they removed the cover flow view, we’ve had grid for years, and the “expanding” grid is from the Zune software of of 3 or 4 years ago, and it sucked then so why bring it upon us now?
No art thumbnails in list views, only for the artist & genre “tabs”. This is particularly irksome with playlists. Can’t see how any view any more than artist is even marginally usable as without the album grouping and thumbnails in the songs list, it just becomes a giant wall of text that the human mind cannot readily use, and the album grid is completely worthess if you have more than a couple of hundred albums.
Searching is much slower since they feel the need to return every possible subgrouping and related subject complete with thumbnails instead of just jumping to what you were searching for like every iTunes ever has. Most egregious, search is no longer contextual – you can no longer search in just a playlist because every search is library wide no matter what you’re doing.
The only upshot is they at least left smartlists intact, although the whole playlists panel is just a fugly afterthought.
I feel as though the entire project was put together by people who hated everything about iTunes, and while it’s always had its haters, you don’t make something better by turning it over to people who have no idea what made it work in the first place. I’ve been managing tens of thousands of songs in excruciating detail for close to a decade with iTunes, starting with the very first version released for Windows back in late 2003. It’s a damn good thing my collection is already organized because this version is near worthless as it makes everything more complicated and harder to “read” than in any previous version.
Apple should fire every single person who was involved with this redesign. I can find not one single place it’s more intuitive or streamlined than iTunes 10. Pure, utter, garbage.
Correction: just discovered there’s the ability to turn off the library wide search.
What exactly is the point in shipping a product with all the default settings exactly opposite of what is useful?
Don’t download. Buggy! I’m very disappointed that Apple pushed back release only to botch. Steve Jobs would be embarrassed by this product. Try searching an artists catalog of individual songs in alphabetical order. You could in iTunes 10. Can’t in iTunes 11.
And now I have duplicate songs in my playlists and I can’t get rid of them. I called Apple and they are clueless as how to fix this.
I’m sure I will find more screwups in the next few days.
@15 I can’t agree more. It’s no better than Itunes 10 and probably worse. The basic problem is that Apple has no regard for people with large libraries. For example, an entry in the search box hangs with the first letter typed. On my computer it will freeze for over a minute while it tries to return the search results. Unacceptable! And it gets worse from there.
Used it for an hour before I uninstalled it. Can someone tell me how something that’s supposed to be simpler and more streamlined is actually less user-friendly,more frustrating and difficult than the previous version? This version of iTunes is a joke.
Couple this with all the patent nonsense that’s going on, and I don’t like the direction Apple is headed.
“It feels lighter and faster.”
On my [i]test[/i] PC (an XP box with 20GB library) iTunes’ memory usage went from 125MB to 377MB, and certainly doesn’t feel snappy. It isn’t [i]horrible[/i], but it is noticeably slower to me.
I agree with #20. I have a larger library (~25,000 songs) and was concerned based on some of these reviews. But I did my back-up, installed 11 and crossed my fingers. I took a few minutes to figure out to turn my sidebar back on and switch to list view. I am perfectly happy now. If I have one complaint, it would be the fairly slow search function as it collects the data. But I do like the output of the search. I also like the “Up Next” and Mini Player. Both are nice features.
So, all-in-all…I do like 11. I am sure I will find pros and cons as I continue to use it. But it does seem a little snappier on my MacBook Air. But not so much as to be praise-worthy.
I really dug CoverFlow & my simple question is thus- Do any of you more knowledgable folks than me about such things know if there is actually a chance of it being returned at some point in an update or as an add-on? & if not, & I decide I truly miss it enough, is it possible to revert to 10.whatever-that-last-number was?
Thanks so much!
I’m enjoying iTunes 11, and I wasn’t sure I would. I’ve never used any view mode other than list, so I was happy to see with a little configuration I could get it working in a way that I was accustomed to.
I absolutely love the Up Next feature and have been taking full advantage of it since installing it. The only problem I can really complain about it that it hangs a bit when you firs try to open it, but that was also the case in iTunes 10 and I have a machine with pretty high specification. I could only imagine how bad it would be on more out-dated machines.
This is my favorite released of iTunes, and I think people just need to give it a fair chance.
Main issues/complaints:
– Does not count play
– Downloaded music today from iTunes store and changed genre to suit my playlists. When playing iTunes automatically changes genre back to the original genre
– Can’t see anything but list of songs when sorting by songs (Not possible to change to see covers etc)
– No cover flow
Conclusion: Want to go back to previous iTunes issue
i miss the playists being on the right, where i can just drag a song into the playlist, am i missing something? is there a way to get that back? thank you
See also my post 23. I have now synced my iPod classic and no album pictures have been added to the iPod even if they are ok in iTunes. This iTunes is a disaster, even bigger than the Apple map…….. 🙁