Filed under: iTunes
iTunes not quite as 'updated' as we thought
Yesterday we told you about iTunes being updated to version 8.1. We went over the features, and you dutifully downloaded it. Then we started hearing from readers (thanks, by the way) about some features missing from the update. What missing features you may ask?Oh, like the Genius suggestions for movie and TV shows. Well, you weren't dreaming it. Those features didn't make it into the version released yesterday and Apple has changed the release notes and their web site to reflect it.
It's kind of bad to mess up on a feature called 'genius' but the other changes all seem to be there. Plus, iTunes is faster for sure.
Stay tuned for the next iTunes update and we'll see if the 'genius' sneaks back in as fast as he snuck out.
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Reader Comments (Page 1 of 2)
itsjackalackin said 4:56PM on 3-12-2009
Its out now.
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JoshK said 5:20PM on 3-12-2009
You don't bother reading really, do you? Do your ankles hurt from jumping to conclusions?
kc! said 5:21PM on 3-12-2009
They didn't mess up on the genius features, they just messed up on announcing the new stuff. Honestly, if we Apple fanatics weren't so diligent in checking all the details, we would never have known the new genius features existed in the first place.
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Michael Montez said 5:28PM on 3-12-2009
8.0 was using 70MB of RAM on my XP system.
8.1 uses 22MB of RAM on my XP system.
My library is about 67GB of media (mostly PODCAST and Music) - the new version is awesome if you ask me (and you did not ask me).
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Thom said 5:38PM on 3-12-2009
New iTunes is still awesome and works way faster. Best is yet to come.
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bill cant fart said 5:41PM on 3-12-2009
Maybe they were being sarcastic when they said "Genius". Like, some "genius" said there's updates.
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Tired_ said 6:20PM on 3-12-2009
So, is this an undocumented lack of features?
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Murphy Mac said 6:29PM on 3-12-2009
I like the DJ thing when used with the Remote app on an iPhone or iPod touch. You can see Genius suggestions when you select a song.
I don't have enough friends to have them voting on songs in my DJ list, but if I did that would be nerd-cool.
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jk said 6:47PM on 3-12-2009
I can't seem to get this to work. My remote app is as it always was. There is no new dj area.
Murphy Mac said 7:00PM on 3-12-2009
Did you look in Playlists?
jbrown510 said 6:32PM on 3-12-2009
One of the things I liked about apple was the didn't needlessly bump up version numbers for marketing purposes. OS X 10.5 being the perfect example.
But really this really should be iTunes 7.8.1. Genuis wasn't worth a full version number, and this update isn't worth a point either.
I'm really being kind as I think this should be called iTunes 5.5.1
...and now we have iPhone 3.0? seriously, is that because they're finally rolling out push functionality promised to be in 2.1 that should have been in 1.2?
I'll give Apple a full version upgrade when they overhual the whole GD patched together mess that iTunes has become.
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Jon said 7:16PM on 3-12-2009
What difference does it make? It's not like Apple is claiming it's a major upgrade and then charging an upgrade fee for it like some developers do.
Josh said 8:58PM on 3-12-2009
Seriously. It's a number. Get over yourself.
Ed said 5:30AM on 3-13-2009
We have no idea what iPhone 3.0 is. I'd hope that they've put more features in this year than last year. Last year they were focused on the SDK, I hope this year they've had more time to look at the core things everyone keeps going on about (MMS, copy and paste etc etc)...
Guillaume Laurent said 6:42PM on 3-12-2009
Apparently they've finally fixed that annoying bug which would cause incomplete albums to be in smart-lists using the "limit to XX selected by random", with "shuffle albums" toggled on.
The irony is that I was using this kind of smart lists to auto-fill my ipod, but now that it's working, there's the "auto fill" feature... which doesn't know how to fill with albums rather than tracks :-).
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boisro said 7:23PM on 3-12-2009
Does anyone think the Genius option for movies and TV shows will actually be useful?
How many of us have been watching a movie and wondered to ourselves, "I wonder what movies other people think go with this movie. I wish I had a custom-built playlist of 25 movies so that I can spend the next few weeks in front of the computer becoming a vegetable."
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Risto T said 1:33AM on 3-13-2009
As any PVR or downloaded content user will tell you,
there is a fundamental problem with only watching what you want, when you want.
After a while you are sick of the shows you have been watching, but since you no longer channel surf or watch ads, you don't know what else might suit your tastes.
Genius is VERY useful for TV shows.
mikeyrogers said 7:31PM on 3-12-2009
You missed the fact that they patched a bug that when you click the X in the search field (iTunes or iTunes Store) it wouldn't let you start typing a new search term. You had to click the X to clear the field, then click in the filed to start typing. Now it's back to the way it was in iTunes 7!
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Len Banks said 7:50PM on 3-12-2009
The feature to rip at iTunes Plus seems to me to be just repackaging. It already could import from CD at 256 kbps. It was just called "highest quality." Using that phrase will make it easier to understand for those who don't know any better, but it isn't a new feature. I'm not disappointed, just find it odd that Apple felt it necessary to highlight this as something new and unique.
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mikeyrogers said 10:41AM on 3-13-2009
I thought the same, too, at first, however notice that it is using VBR to encode. I don't think that was an option before. I could be wrong, though.