Apple releases iTunes 9, iPhone OS 3.1 and overhauls iTunes Store

 

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Posted on 10 Sep 2009 at 00:28

At Apple's press conference on Wednesday, Steve Jobs took to the stage at San Francisco's Yerba Buena Center for the Arts to give the lowdown on Apple's latest music products. This is the first time he has helmed an Apple event since his medical leave of absence was announced in January.

Before getting to the nitty gritty of new products, Jobs announced that his liver transplant came from someone in their mid-twenties who died in a car crash. He urged onlookers to be generous and become organ donors themselves. He also thanked everyone in the Apple community for their support during his health troubles. In thanking Apple executives for ably running the company in his absence, Apple's Chief Operating Officer, Tim Cook, was notably singled out.

After these sobering thoughts, it was down to matters that were fully expected: "Today we get to talk about music," declared Jobs, who took the moment to slip in the mention that Apple has sold over 30 million iPhones in a little over two years. A large part of this was credited to the App Store, with its ever-growing collection of apps, currently numbering 75,000, and a total of 1.8 billion downloads. Jobs keenly emphasised that this figure does not include updates, which would take it much higher.

The iPhone tied in nicely to his next announcement, which also affects the iPod touch. As of today, iPhone OS 3.1 is available for download from iTunes. It includes a mix of new features and bug fixes, and it will be free to anyone with an iPhone or iPod touch that's already running OS 3.0.

Among the new features is the extension of Genius to include app recommendations. At the top of the App Store (on an iPhone) is a new button that delivers this feature. Also new are ringtones from the major labels, which will be $1.29 with free previews and one-click purchasing. Jobs gave an update on figures for the iTunes Store, proudly announcing that it's now the world's number one music retailer. Apple has sold more than 8.5 billion songs and there are over 100,000,000 accounts with credit cards registered with the store.

It turns out that one-click purchasing is now the only way to buy items from the iTunes Store, as the shopping cart has disappeared entirely in iTunes 9. That was the next item on the agenda. The first new feature announced was Genius Mixes. Since the introduction of Genius last September, 27 million iTunes libraries containing 54 billion songs have been submitted and analysed by Apple, which Jobs believes will give you better recommendations than ever before. Genius Mixes uses the same technology and database and plays DJ to give you "endless mixes of songs from your iTunes library." iTunes will make up to 12 of them and they'll play for as long as you want them to.

Synchronising media to iPods and iPhones is improved. It can still be done by playlist, and you can specify that you want all tracks from a genre or by a particular artist now, too. In the Sync Music pane are search fields that help you to search large libraries. These changes apply to other media, so on a Mac you can still sync iPhoto's albums, but also choose particular people and places end up on your iPod, so long as you're running iPhoto 09. Movies are also catered for.

Next up is Home Sharing, which allows you to keep libraries on up to five computers in sync. You can copy songs, movies, TV shows and other media just by dragging them from a shared library into your own. There's also a filter so you can quickly see which items you don't have. New purchases can automatically be synchronised in the background so that every family member's library is kept up to date.