So many publications have been publishing articles about how “iTunes is dead,” but it doesn’t look very dead to me. Apple announced, at this week’s Worldwide Developer Conference, that iTunes (on the Mac) would be split into three apps: Music, Podcasts, and Apple TV. As such, iTunes itself isn’t really dead, but just split into a few separate parts.
Apple has published a document outlining the changes, and, well, it doesn’t look very dead to me… In essence, nothing much has changed.
For years, people have been kvetching about iTunes, and all it took was for Apple to move a couple of media kinds to different apps, and to change the name of the music player, and everyone’s suddenly happy, but also dancing around the grave of an app that hasn’t really changed that much. You can still buy music from the iTunes Store, rip your CDs, sync your devices, make playlists, and so on.
MacDailyNews Take: iTunes is like a liver, cut in pieces, all still alive. (Plus, the thing is still completely intact in all of its bloated glory down in Windows hell).
Why would anyone think that Apple would eliminate any of iTunes functionality by breaking the single iTunes app into three more focused media apps?
If Apple were to take away important features like the iTunes Music Store, the uproar would be deafening.
Some folks are truly stunning in their ability to fail to think things through…
And some people “updated” Pages.
What the article doesn’t address is whether/how the Apple TV app on a Mac will sync existing libraries of shows/movies/home movies to Apple TV devices. I assume it will…but…
It will work the same way it always has. All of the original functionality of iTunes remains, and the files structure remains the same. The only change is that the functionality of the old ‘iTunes’ app is now distributed across the ‘Apple Music’, ‘Podcasts’, ‘Apple TV’, and ‘Finder’ apps.
It will not sync your video library to AppleTV devices. Neither will iTunes. AppleTVs haven’t had substantial local storage in years. They are almost entirely just streaming devices. Syncing is an audio and book thing.
Currently, I sync for streaming purposes the iTunes on my home-mac to my AppleTV. Then, through AppleTV’s “Computer” button, I access the contents of my computer’s iTunes libraries. It works well. My concern is that it will continue to work well under this new arrangement. I have a very large library of movies and TV shows … I hope to still be able to stream them from my computer to my TV through AppleTV without losing the ease of its functionality. I’ve always wanted to be able to display movies and TV shows I own under Movies and TV … maybe this will become integrated, too? Who knows? I hope so.
So it’ll take multiple Apps to do everything I currently and easily do within one? I’ll admit it, I only have 700 cd’s worth of my music I’ve ripped, 500 or so that I’ve bought through iTunes over the years and perhaps 1,000 movies, so perhaps I don’t know what a large, unwieldy library looks like, but one App that manages everything is exactly what I want and will continue to use.
The thing is, I did this years ago by creating two different iTunes libraries. One was iTunes Music, the other was iTunes Media. With over 200k music tracks ripped from CDs and over 500 older (DRM free) DVDs (that I own) and home videos added to a single iTunes catalog, it became so slow and unresponsive that it was virtually unusable. By separating out the videos, I could run it as a media server to our Apple TVs. I’ve even curated the videos to just the ones we actually want to watch because iTunes still does not like that massive file. I’m hoping the new AppleTV app works better with these types of files.