Apple, speaking at their “Rock n’ Roll” live event today, introduced iTunes 9 and with it, a plethora of new features.
The first addition is that of Genius mixes. Apple CEO Steve Jobs explains that the Genius library now has 27 million libraries built from 54 billion analyzed tracks, which will create Genius Mixes, personal radio stations similar to Pandora.
The Genius also works for movies and even applications you have downloaded from the iTunes store.
The second improvement was improved Syncing, as Apple says, for when “you sync to your iPod Touch or iPhone we have made that much better.” Users can now choose select playlists, artists, genres, and photos from certain events, certain albums or even photos that only include certain faces. Movies have been give a “recently added” and you can manually choose favorites.
Additionally, Home Sharing makes it easy for users to sync an iTunes library between up to 5 computers in a house. All authorized computers can share music, movies and TV shows between them, and will be viewed as part of a shared group where users can drag and drop content from one library to another.
The next feature is iTunes LP. All the artist pages have been given more visual material as well photos, liner notes and essays. iTunes Extra allows users to check extra content on DVDs and Blu-rays.
Finally is the App Management page which allows users to virtually arrange all the apps, while seeing a preview of how your iPhone home screen will look. You can also easily search for your applications, good for those that have tens or even hundreds of apps.
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Result for: drag and drop
At the NAB yearly meeting this week, Sony has reaffirmed its commitment to Blu-ray Java (BD-J) and announced new upgrades to all authoring software by Sony and third party sources.
With these latest announcements, Sony hopes to silence critics which had complained, and rightfully so, that HD DVD was the far more advanced format in terms of authoring functionality.
DVD Architect, part of Vegas Pro, and Blu-print applications have now been updated to fully support the BD-J platform. The program allows menus and other content on BD to “be organized” which will include interactive content such as BD-J. While Architect is more suited for independent content creators, Blu-print is an application for professional authoring houses.
Additionally, Sonic has upgraded its popular HD authoring software Scenarist which will now all for easier creation of more advanced BD-J content. The new features include a new “project creation wizard, drag and drop functionality, security tools, and additional BD-J tutorials.”
Result for: drag and drop
In what should be welcomed warmly by owners of jailbroken iPhones or iPod Touches, members of ZodTTD have announced they have successfully ported the extremely powerful media player VLC (Video Lan Client) to the media devices.
Dubbed vlc4iphone, the port has its own frontend and will make your iPhone or iPod Touch capable of drag-and-drop playback of MP3, XviD, FLAC, MPEG2, MPEG4, h264, and OGG formats.
According to the official post on the site the project is still in beta, but it is expected to be released to the public in the near future.
The list of new additions, according to the post, are:
* Compiled in FFmpeg!
* MANY more decoders supported, including support for XviD, h264, MPEG4, FLAC, 3GP, MP3, MPEG2, AVI, and more!
* Added volume control.
* Fixed a warning when no media is found.
* Increased the size of vlc4iphone’s binary from 5MB to 24MB! Lots of media goodness packed inside!
Unfortunately, for right now the beta is only available to ZodTTD Beta Testers. You can however, become a tester by donating to the site, if you cannot wait for the public release.
