iTunes 9: A Quick Look at Some Small Changes

iTunes 9 sports a refreshed interface, but the majority of its features are similar to the way they were before. I’m going to write about some of the more interesting features – especially Home Sharing – after I’ve had time to test them completely, but here’s a quick overview of some of the small changes that may actually be important to the way you use the program.

• The Mini Player: iTunes lets you “shrink” its window to display a mini-player to control the program while you’re listening to music. Everyone was used to clicking the green jelly-bean in the top left corner of the iTunes window to change the window size, but this was actually an interface aberration. Apple has corrected this, so the green button does what it should: it expands or contracts the window, but doesn’t change the display in the window. Now, you need to choose View > Switch to Mini Player, or press Command-Shift-M. (I just found out, a couple of hours after publishing this, that you can hold down the Option key and click the green button to get the previous behavior.)
• The browser: iTunes has long had a browser that displayed in two or three columns above your music. Apple has made some additions to this browser in iTunes 9. You can have additional columns display; I’m very happy to see this, because it means that I can display a Composer column. In addition, you can display the browser to the left of your music, in slim, tall columns. (Personally, I don’t like this position, and not all the columns, such as Composer, display at the left.) Choose View > Column Browser to make these adjustments.
• The iTunes Media folder: iTunes used to have an “iTunes Music” folder, but Apple has changed the name to reflect the types of content you have; it’s not the “iTunes Media” folder. You’ll only see this new name if you create a new library, or if you’re using iTunes for the first time. You don’t need to worry about changing the name of your folder; any name is fine, actually.

I’ll be back soon with some thoughts on Home Sharing – what I think is the best new feature to be added to iTunes in years. It allows you to easily transfer music from one iTunes library to another over your network (within a local network; it’s mainly for people sharing music at home, as its name suggests).