iTunes

The long-expected new version of iTunes is finally out. Many have been waiting for it since Apple announced they were going to bring a complete redesign of their product.

And an upgrade to iTunes 11 makes rather drastic changes as besides greatly altered interface, Apple has introduced such features as New MiniPlayer, Up Next and Playback syncing with iCloud.

The alterations were applied to many aspects of the utility: even the icon has a new look and can actually now be easily confused with the Mac App store one on the Dock. iTunes now has a much more colorful interface. The automatic background color for albums is a particularly delightful feature even though the whole interface now has even more white space than ever before. Unfortunately, Album view gives you no option of changing the overwhelming size of the album icons.

After cutting a great deal of features such as Cover Flow, DJ, DeDuper and Multiple windows iTunes became lighter and faster, which seems a great improvement since the program’s slow performance has been its greatest disadvantage for years. But it obviously became fast to the certain limits.

The new MiniPlayer sports some changes as well. Now it has the Up Next button enabling you to see what’s going to be played next as well as the search option. Now it likewise displays album covers. Some rather important features are now missing in it, though: a progress indicator and a volume bar.

The search option now allows you to search for your entire library including movies, TV shows, Podcasts and so on, which is a disadvantage for those with large collection of media files as they will have to wait for the results for quite some time. This problem, however, can be solved by unchecking the Search Entire Library function.

The interaction of your iTunes media across all your devices is much better now due to iCloud. Now you don’t need to have physical copies of all your content purchased in iTunes on all of your devices and machines. Besides, iCloud remembers where you stopped playing a movie or a TV show on your computer so you can continue watching it on, say, your notebook.

As Apple promised, iTunes has gone through radical amends. I cannot deny the beauty of its new Album view, though I can see how impractical it is. And now I can say that it can even be used as a player, not only as a music organizer. I didn't notice that it worked faster for me and I think that the features that have been omitted were actually rather useful. Well, there’s still a lot of space for perfection.