ITunes has been updated to 8.1, and the accompanying iPhone Remote application has gotten a bump to v1.2. The release notes tell us that the update is "faster and more responsive", but in normal use it seems to be the same old click-and-wait interface we’ve grown to love.
The bump-up in speed can clearly be seen when you sync an iPod, though. Backing up my iPod Touch was noticeably faster than in the last version, and it seems to be less sluggish throughout the whole sync process.
But speed increases, while nice, aren’t as much fun as new features, and there are some of those, too. First, the never-used Party Shuffle has been renamed to the confusing-to-use iTunes DJ. When used on the Mac or PC, it works more or less the same as the old Party Shuffle. But when you fire up an iPhone or iPod with the Remote App, chaos ensues.
Anyone with an iPhone (which should be everyone at your party — if not,
find newer, hipper friends) can queue tracks in the playlist. To do so,
they hit the new "Request a Song"" button in the iTunes DJ section:
This takes you to a regular browsing screen:
(The misspelling of the artist’s name is a mistake in the iTunes Store, by the way). When you choose a song it is added to the queue and will play next. It also has a little heart symbol next to it, showing that you have voted. I believe that if other people at the party vote for a song it will rise up the playlist, but I have no friends to try it out with.
Here’s how it looks in iTunes:
So far, fine. But what happens if, instead of pressing the "Request a Song" button, you just hit one of the songs in the list? It starts playing. This makes it trivially easy to interrupt the current song, which is annoying at best, and disastrous in the middle of a party. Worse, there doesn’t appear to be any way to add new songs to the bottom of the queue — every time somebody chooses a new song it jumps the queue to the top. This last seems so absurd there must be a setting to change it. Maybe I just didn’t find it yet.
UPDATE: I de-registered my iPod with my Mac’s library and tried out the DJ guest function. When connecting, you get this new screen, with my friendly welcome message:
From there you enter the usual remote interface with one exception.
You cannot actually hit a song in the "upcoming" list to make it play.
You can only vote on songs in that list and when you press "Request a
Song" you can browse the whole library to do just that. It will be
added to the queue below the next highest voted track.
There’s one more part to the new iTunes DJ list. You can opt to have it show a greeting message, as seen at the top of the post. I apparently have some privilege, as I didn’t see it upon my connection. Without more hardware to test it, my assumption is that this allows guest access to the DJ function without having to authorize the iPhone first.
UPDATE: It looks like the following feature, quite sensibly, didn’t make it in —
despite being featured on the original product page for iTunes 8.1.
The next big change is to the Genius feature. It now works with movies and TV shows, building a playlist based on the first item you choose. Why? You’d need to have both a huge library and a lot of time to make this useful. I might have a hard time choosing what music I want to listen to, but when its time for TV or a movie I know exactly what I want. A curious choice indeed from Apple.
Next, you can have iTunes autofill any iPod, just as it does with the Shuffle. This function has kind of been there from the beginning to deal with too-large libraries and too-small iPods, but now it actually changes over time, instead of offering a static selection. An Improvement.
Lastly, you can now import CDs as "iTunes Plus" tracks. What does this mean? It means there is a now an automatic setting to rip CDs at 256 kbps AAC tracks. This may be useful for people who never venture into the advanced encoding options, but for the rest of us, this has been in iTunes all along.
So iTunes 8.1 looks to be a fair upgrade. Nothing exciting, but — so far at least — nothing broken. And if you have the new Talking Shuffle, you have no choice — you have to upgrade.
Product page [Apple]
