Following up the news this morning, Apple has released their iTunes 8.1 update. The download clocks in at 63.4MB, and I've downloaded it myself to try out the changes.First and foremost, here's Apple's changelog that you'll see when you install it:
iTunes 8.1 is now faster and more responsive. You will enjoy noticeable improvements when working with large libraries, browsing the iTunes Store, preparing to sync with iPod or iPhone, and optimizing photos for syncing.
In addition, iTunes 8.1 provides many other improvements and bug fixes, including:
- Supports syncing with iPod shuffle (3rd generation)
- Allows friends to request songs for iTunes DJ
- Adds Genius sidebar for your Movies and TV Shows
- Improves performance when downloading iTunes Plus songs
- Provides AutoFill for manually managed iPods
- Allows CDs to be imported at the same sound quality as iTunes Plus
- Includes many accessibility improvements
- Allows iTunes U and the iTunes Store to be disabled separately using Parental Controls
First impressions:
First of all, I tried out syncing a movie to see if there were any speed changes there. Before the update, I put a 1.18GB movie onto my iPod touch, which took bang on 3 minutes. I removed the movie, and installed my iTunes 8.1 update. After that was done, I installed the same movie, which took 2 minutes and 10 seconds. Not a bad speed increase, and it'll add up when putting on a whole range of content.
The iTunes Store, to me, didn't feel much faster. iTunes itself felt faster moving between Music, Movies and TV Shows, but the iTunes Store felt the same. Maybe it'll take a bit more testing, but I looked around quite a bit, as well as closing iTunes once and reopening it to test again. Your mileage may vary, but that's what I found at least.
(Note: I'm on Mac OS X, so my speeds will most likely be different to those using Windows. I haven't had the chance to test it yet, but I'm sure the comments will indicate what it's like.)
One cool feature I thought was iTunes DJ (Party Shuffle, just renamed). It's called this because this morning's Remote (for iPhone/iPod touch) application update allows you to request songs while iTunes DJ is running. That's pretty handy, if you ask me. I decided to give this a try, and discovered a small niggle; your iPhone or iPod touch has to have their Remote app paired with iTunes. So, that would either make for a very awkward beginning to a party, or people would have to request you to request a song. It'd be nice if you could anonymously request a song, providing you know the person's iTunes library name, but that could bring problems if there are people next door with an iPhone or iPod touch.
Those are my initial impressions, and if you care to download iTunes yourself, you can do so below or use Apple's Software Update.
Download: iTunes 8.1 Download
Wow.... sorry but I can't believe people are using this bloatware. Ever heard of Foobar or Amarok?
Anyway, I know that what other uses is none of my business, but... damn, this is just outrageous. This things runs like 3 processes in the background.. gahh
- Allows CDs to be imported at the same sound quality as iTunes Plus
Is that suppose to be like a favor or something. like a new feature?!!? What's wrong with LAME V0 and/or 320kbps or even FLAC??
Anyway. my 2 cents...
I guess you never bothered to look in the %System Root%Program FilesiTunesiTunes.Resources folder and see that it includes many language files. Yes they could do a single language release and trim it down some but they rather push out a multilingual release and there is really nothing wrong with that. Even the Quicktime Folder has multingual resource files in it. The players themselves are actually a lot smaller than you are making them out to be.
The download could probably be 20-30MB at most if they stripped out the multilingual resources.
I suggest you do some research to see how slow/fast the new iTunes 8.1 is before you jump to conclusions and call it "bloatware".
It is probably almost as fast as foobar with this update and I am not even exaggerating.
You are seriously exaggerating.
LOL, yeah, Amarok is so fast and light.
I bet in Snow Leopard, it'll be cut off by like 50-80%, which is awesome
I'd rather use WMP than Mplayer. WMP has a better interface.
For movies WMP Classic is still the best with VLC a close second. For music anything with a good way to handle playlists do the job. I find WMP to have playlist management that is better than most players out there.
Judging by this comment of yours, you must not have very good hardware at all. Therefore, because it runs extremely fast on my average hardware, I stand by what I said; I am not exaggerating
Actually on linux it's nice, if it only didn't install so much KDE libs along with it...
Wow.... sorry but I can't believe people are using this bloatware. Ever heard of Foobar or Amarok?
Anyway, I know that what other uses is none of my business, but... damn, this is just outrageous. This things runs like 3 processes in the background.. gahh
- Allows CDs to be imported at the same sound quality as iTunes Plus
Is that suppose to be like a favor or something. like a new feature?!!? What's wrong with LAME V0 and/or 320kbps or even FLAC??
Anyway. my 2 cents...
Amarok?
You have been fallen on your head?
How much space takes to install Amarok in windows? Do you even know?
Were you comparing iTunes to other software or not?
Other software runs fine on lesser hardware.
I just tried to download a song but I keeps timing out.
As for this new release, noticed no difference or speed increase. Ah well.
If people want it to be "faster" it will be. It's called placebo.
In conclusion: iTunes continues to be worthless.
Uninstalled. [edit]
wait...
wait...
wait...
OK now uninstalled (15 mins after telling it to).
Last edited by shakey_snake on 12 Mar 2009 - 03:29
Your slowness issues and other problems, what exaclty are you running for hardware? You must have some old pieces in that machine. It absolutely flies on the three machines I have installed it for thus far, I still have 3 more to go at least.
And your time between initial post and edit was 11 minutes, that is hardly 40 minutes. Please stop spreadnig the FUD.
Not you martog
1. I started the uninstall process before posting the first time
2. I had to manually kill firefox to uninstall the Bonjour service. WTF.
Still never answered on what kind of hardware you are trying to run it on. Obiviously you either have a slow machine or a conflict somewhere that is causing your issues.
If there's a conflict somewhere, how is that not iTunes' fault? Other media apps (fb2k, zune player, the new Songbird, J. River MC) using libraries watching the exact same folders don't make my system chug like it's 5 years old. :|
I didn't close firefox between installing and uninstalling iTunes. There was nothing to see in the plugins or extensions.
Last edited by shakey_snake on 12 Mar 2009 - 04:05
Now iTunes uninstalles previous versions during an install, so I installed on the following two computers:
Athlon 64 X2 4200+ 7200RPM SATA, took:8minutes for complete uninstall/install.
Celeron D 2.4GHz 512MB 40GB 7200RPM IDE took: 7 minutes for uninstall/install
You do have a newer system yes so I am unsure why iTunes would be causing the issues you are having. I am just not experiencing slow downs on any of my systems, not even on the Celeron D system, which is amazing as it used to dog on that computer. Something is not agreeing with inside of your computer and I wish I could tell you what, especially since how well it runs on lower spec machines. Only the Celeron D is running XP, all the others are running Vista 64bit and one runs Server 2008 64bit.
Apple fanatics just can't handle unbiased reviews sometimes. Just look at the comments.
Apple fanatics just can't handle unbiased reviews sometimes. Just look at the comments.
Yes because installing on 5 different computers all non-Apple running Windows Vista, 2008 and XP are biased, right?
I've posted honest feedback using systems far less powerful than his, unforunately he had a bad time but I have had nothing but good with my experience so far. Hardly a fanatic here as I will be selling my Macbook Pro soon as I got HP laptop to replace it.
Looking at the comments makes me believe this application works better than previous versions of it.
Of course i wont install it as iTune is a bad music player if you compare it to anything else including WMP, i don't own an iPod and i'm not using iTune music store.
I never owned any Apple product. Would like to buy a Touch but too much expensive for my taste (same thing for the Zune there's better options for less in Canada like Sansa).
Windows beeing what it is i'm sorry but when you have a problem un-installing an application there's 50% chance that the problem comes from Windows and 50% it comes from the application installer itself. Generally it's a good idea to try to install and un-install it on a 2nd machine before going to a forum and write about it.
Had problem once installing a copy of Adobe Creative Suite CS (legit of course) on a computer running XP at work. Took age to install, did not work once installed and finally un-installation bugged too. I did not go to neowin board to complain about it acting like it is was 100% sure the problem came from Adobe Creative Suite CS. Turned out that the DVD drive had problem reading the second disc for an unkown reason.
**** happens. Need to try more than once on different computers to be sure it comes from the application itself.
Last edited by LaP on 12 Mar 2009 - 17:17
Apple fanatics just can't handle unbiased reviews sometimes. Just look at the comments.
You know the same thing could be said about you being a "fanatic".
Xero, as much as I don't agree with shakey_snake's opinion on iTunes 8.1, he is still allowed to voice his opinion and your attitude is really horrible. Please, respect another person's opinion and debate/discuss maturely with them.
mozilla FTW!!!
The iTunes Store is not displayed using WebKit. It is displayed using WebObjects.
So it's WebObjects eh? but then how does it get rendered/displayed?
http://weblogs.mozillazine.org/hyatt/archi..._06.html#005666
Last edited by Calum on 13 Mar 2009 - 01:49
Last edited by Calum on 13 Mar 2009 - 01:45
No. You don't because you are wrong.
But you'll never admit [< snipped > - Calum]
Last edited by Calum on 13 Mar 2009 - 01:46
http://forums.appleinsider.com/showthread.php?p=1389125
A Windows app should take advantage of the luxuries the windows platform provides it.
Day two of unqualified, inaccurate statements supporting Apple?
I wonder who are the trolls here ? Not clear to me.
When you make a bizarre statement like that it begs to be corrected. Windows doesn't have the same resources as OSX? It doesn't have an update service, device management, and LAN peer-to-peer?
Running C2D 2,2 Ghz and 4 gig RAM
And thats with iTunes DJ playing :/
I have had 4 iPods in my time and I i feel that one of the only things that let it down is the iTunes app. Its almost like the only people who like iTunes are the people who have no idea. You can't honestly think that it is a good piece of software. Like it just blows my mind how crap it is. Sure transfer speeds are pretty sweet, but the program just feels like it is the iexplorer7 of the media player genre.
Hooray for Floola.
Good upgrade, for me anyways. After I install, I go ahead and uninstall all the bloatware crap that I don't need; the Bonjor, MobileDeviceSupport (also includes mobileme), and AppleUpdate. If you ask me these additional packages are good to have, but should be part of a customized setup for those that do not need them. I mean if I uncheck the box for do not update itunes automatically, why the hell does it still install apple update?
To be honest I cannot see any difference at all.... is it just me or what because I see no change in performance although it runs a little smoother on Windows and that's about it.
Blazing fast for me under Vista
itunes "fanboys" are really crazy, telling people to upgrade their pc's so itunes runs smoothly, its a joke.
If the ARM processors found in portable players can playback music and scroll a list at the same time, theres no reason any any full size computer from the last 15 years should choke on basically the same task.
Let's just be glad Apple doesn't have the iTunes-Windows team writing their firmware revisions.
Last edited by shakey_snake on 13 Mar 2009 - 13:34
That freezing problem is what almost sent me back to XP. Now that that's fixed, I'm happy ^-^
Also
So does that mean it won't freeze for 2 minutes per song like it did for me? YAY! (I have lost 3 tracks on an album due to this and had to request Apple to let me redownload them)
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