iTunes 8.0 New Features

Apple recently released their iTunes 8.0 with “new” features. But what new features? It seems as though pretty much nothing changed. I’ve scowered through iTunes looking for improvements and things they got rid of. Let’s start with the most obvious first.

Many people will have noticed a new way to browse your music called “Grid View.” It shows all your music in a grid and displays them by album showing their artwork (as long as you have them).

Apple added a new visualizer that uses 3D gravity & magnetism effects. You can quickly switch to the visualizer by pressing “Ctrl+T.”

The new update enables support with 2.1 firmware iPhones, iPod Touch 2G, and the new Nanos.

In the iTunes Store, iTunes 8.0 allows for quality TV Shows to be downloaded & bought for just $2.99. More and more of these affordable high quality videos are being added everyday so why don’t you go check them out.

Probably the most unique and special feature to hit iTunes, is Genius Playlist Creation and Sidebar. You can get more info on that here.

Lastly the one thing that wasn’t mentioned is that they removed the movie convert feature to watch on Apple TVs, iPods, and iPhones. You no longer see a “Convert Selection to Apple TV” or “Convert Selection to iPhone/iPod” when right clicking a movie. Why did they get rid of this feature? Nobody knows… It may be because of the long time it takes for the movie to be converted. Only non-iTunes DRM protected files can be converted into other formats, and probably Apple realized other 3rd party software is best for this (Videora, Crusoft, etc). Apple is getting rid of our rights in the technology world. App Store submissions constantly get rejected, their service agreements and private policies become stricter and stricter… When will it ever end?

And for those of you who haven’t already downloaded iTunes 8: