LIVE: Apple announces iTunes 9, revamped iTunes Store and new iPods

Posted on 9 Sep 2009 at 14:34

Steve Jobs has taken to the stage at the Buena Center for the Arts in San Francisco to give us the lowdown on Apple's latest product announcements. This is the first time he has helmed an Apple event since he announced his medical leave of absence.

He announced that his liver transplant came from someone in their mid-twenties who died in a car crash, and urges people to be generous and become organ donors. Jobs is thanking everyone in the Apple community for their support, and especially Tim Cook and other executives who ran Apple ably in his absence.

"Today, we get to talk about music."

Phil Schiller and Jeff Robins, VP of iTunes engineering, will be joining Jobs on stage. First, though, Jobs announced that in a little over two years, Apple has sold 30 Million iPhones. He lays a large part of the credit to the App Store, with its 75,000 apps and 1.8 billion downloads, which doesn't include updates.

Today Apple is releasing something new for iPhone and iPod touch: iPhone OS 3.1, with a new features and bug fixes.

Genius will be extended to recommend apps, as well as songs. Turn on your iPhone and there's a new Genius button at the top of the store front.

A second thing added today is ringtones from major labels. They'll be $1.29 with free previews and one-click purchasing. Bought just like other music. Jobs says this is a breakthrough price for ringtones. Free for iPhone users, and free for iPod touch owners with OS 3.0.

Moves onto the iTunes Store. It's now the number one music retailer in the world. Apple has sold over 8.5 billion songs, and has over 100,000,000 accounts on iTunes with credit cards, which makes it one of the largest stores on the Web.

iTunes 9 is announced, with a new appearance that cleans up the media player's appearance.

New features:

Genius mixes

27M libraries with 54 billion songs submitted and analysed. Jobs hopes that recommendations have become better because of this. The same technology and database will be applied to Genius Mixes, which is a DJ that plays "endless mixes of songs from your iTunes library." iTunes will make up to 12 of them from your library. They will just keep playing.

Improved syncing - can sync by playlist still, but also by genre and artist name. Sync Music pane includes search fields for browsing large libraries. Similarly, on a Mac you can sync photo albums but also Events and Faces from iPhoto 09. Movies also work.

The long-rumoured feature for managing icons on the iPhone and iPod touch home screen is revealed next.

You can stream music from other libraries around your house, but the new home sharing feature lets you copy songs, movies, TV shows and other media to the other five computers that you've authorised through the iTunes Store. There's also a filter to show what's on other computers that isn't on your own.

iTunes Store has been redesigned with a new layout that includes artist pages.

The last new features in iTunes is called iTunes LP. Jobs touts a love of liner notes and artwork, and says that this doesn't have to be lost in the move to digital music. Shows some examples with videos, lyrics and discographies included. Apple is giving the tools to create iTunes LPs to the labels and artists.

Jobs says these are just a few of the features in iTunes 9. Jeff Robins comes to the stage to demo the new version.

Robins shows the drag and drop method for arranging app icons on an iPhone or iPod touch. You can drag more than one icon at a time. Double-clicking an app in your iTunes library takes you to the screen where it resides on your iPhone. You can rearrange pages just by dragging them up and down the list.