Adi's Tech Site

Apple has hit yet another big milestone with their iTunes store.  The music downloading service hit 25 billion songs downloaded. As with their other milestones, Apple awarded the lucky person to download the 25 billionth song with a €10,000 iTunes gift card. In this case it was Phillip Lüpke in Germany.

The way you browse the “Movies” section is similar to how you browse music by album. You will see a thumbnail for each of the videos in your library.  From there click on the video you want to see and a banner will pop up showing any information available about the video.  If it’s something you’ve downloaded from the iTunes store then it will populate the information fields for you. When you play your video it will take up the entire window, or go into full screen based on what you have set up by default.  Not only that, but you also have the ability to see which videos you have not watched, and browse by genre.  If you preview things in a similar fashion to iTunes 11 then you still have a “list” view if you want it.

Now that I’ve covered most of the music part of iTunes 11, what happens when you plug an iOS device into your computer?  Well, let’s take a look.  The first thing you will notice is a button which shows us the device that we have plugged in.  For the purpose of this article, I have chosen my iPhone.

The next thing we will see is a detailed break-down of all the different information on the iPhone plugged into the computer(or other iOS device for that matter). At the top, you have the iOS device plugged in, the maximum amount of data you can store on it, the phone number the amount of charge left on the device and the option to update or restore the iOS device.

In the middle segment of the screen you have the backup options(iCloud and your computer) as well as the ability to encrypt the backup. Of course, you have the ability to back up when you want and restore your device from a backup.

At the bottom of the screen you have the ability to choose what options you would like when using the device with iTunes 11.  A couple of the options include Wi-Fi syncing, space saving options, and the ability to manually manage music and videos.

At the very bottom of the page is a very colourful bar. This shows you the storage being taken up by the different content on the device.  This includes audio, video, photos, apps and other data.  Of course, the amount of free space is also shown in grey.

Of course, you have the ability to eject the iOS device when you’re done with loading content onto it.

Apple have chosen an interesting way to execute this one. You will see all of the album covers for all of the albums which the songs in your library come from.  To show the songs you have in a particular album, simply click on the album cover for the album you want.  A banner with the cover art for the album will show on the right.  On the left you will see all the songs you have in the album.  In this example, I clicked on the album “Permission to Land” by The Darkness.  It shows all the songs from that album and the cover art on the right-hand side.  In my opinion it’s quite an artistic approach and will take some getting used to if you like viewing your music by album.

With regards to browsing songs by playlist, things are very similar to iTunes 10.  Simply select the playlist you want to view from the sidebar on the left-hand side and all the songs in that playlist will be shown. As you can see in this screenshot, I have all the songs which I’ve purchased from the iTunes store.

Another new feature in iTunes 11 is a semi-revamped system with regards to the way you browse for songs by artist.  As the screenshot on the left demonstrates, you will have the artists/bands on the left-hand sidebar along with the album cover thumbnails(if available). When you click on an artist/them you will see all the songs by them in your library.  For the purpose of this demo, you can see I have a couple of songs from a few Bret Michaels albums. A bigger album art picture would show up for each of the albums I have as shown in the main area of the window.   If you scroll up to the top of the left-hand sidebar and choose “all artists” then you will see all the music you have sorted by artist.