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Did you miss the Apple “Rock and Roll” event from a few days ago? Well why read about all the new iPod & Itunes news when you can watch the entire keynote event for yourself. Download it via iTunes or stream it directly from Apple’s website right now. Some notable news includes – iPod Touch third generation: now up to 64GB storage, iPod Classic gets more storage, iPod Shuffle gets more colors and a special edition, the new iPod Nano shoots video and plays radio.
iTunes 9 is out and sports some new features. The store has seen a general redesign as well—the most prominent part being the ever-present menubar at the top, which replaces the awkward breadcrumb system from before.
iTunes LPs: These are effectively like bonus CDs for digital albums.
iTunes Extra: Like iTunes LPs for films, this gives you a downloadable equivalent of DVD extras for films, with interviews, supplemental clips and photo galleries.
Media Sharing: The software’s getting some pretty fantastic new functionality outside the store as well—it’s got media sharing, at least on your local network: You can copy songs, movies, and TV shows to up to 5 authorized computers, or simply stream them. This is pretty huge, and a definite about-face for Apple, which has been slowly stripping out sharing functionality from iTunes from the beginning.
An App Manager: you can rearrange and manage apps from within iTunes for your iPhone and iPod Touch, which was one of those simple feature upgrades people have been clamoring for for months. Apple’s version of the app manager is better thought out than the concepts we’ve seen before. Apps can be dragged and dropped, either alone or in groups, and selectively synced. Awesome.
Syncing, Genius and Social Networking: A few odds and ends here—iTunes 9 also brings finer sync controls, including options to sync genres or artists instead of just playlists, and more options for video and photo syncing. There are also new “Genius Playlists,” which are just general library mixes that iTunes thinks you’ll like, rather than the old Genius playlists, which were based on a particular artist. Social networking support is nowhere near as deep as rumored—it just gives you shortcuts to spam your friends with links to iTunes store pages over Twitter, et al. Apple’s also thrown in a little treat for Windows users: Playback controls from the Windows 7 task bar.
