iTunes 9 & iPhone 3.1 brings Improved Syncing & Home Sharing capabilities

Better together!  Usually reserved for Microsoft’s marketing ploy’s when it comes to purchasing their products, I am now using it to promote the 2 latest offerings from Apple.  iTunes 9 and the latest iPhone and iPod Touch OS 3.1 was released by Apple almost a couple of weeks ago at their scheduled event in San Francisco.  If you missed the announcements, you can read more about it in my previous post here. Why together?  Apple have made various enhancements to iTunes 9 which I will go through in some detail and even though there wasn’t much improvement in the iPhone/iPod Touch OS, the two products do go hand in hand and both must be upgraded to take advantage of these improvements.  Today’s article will focus on 2 of the notable features, “Improved Syncing” and “Home Sharing”

1. Improved Syncing with the iPhone/iPod Touch

The most welcomed improvement by Apple is the ability to not only synchronise your applications (we could do that already) but the ability to re-arrange our applications on various home screens via the virtual interface that is provided within iTunes 9.  iTunes will then automatically sync your new Home screens with your iPhone or iPod Touch when it is docked.  I’m a classic example of most iPhone/iPod Touch users who may have dozens and dozens of applications spread across 5 or more home pages and re-arranging these in the past was a cumbersome and tedious task and limited to the actual hand set’s touch screen interface.

2. Home Sharing

iTunes 9 now allows you to share and browse through your iTunes library with up to 5 authorised computers in your house.  I was quite surprised at how easy this was to setup allowing me to have a central store of all my music and videos without necessary duplication on my other PC’s.  As an example, my home Mac contains my Music Library which can now be accessed by my Windows 7 Toshiba laptop without copying any music across.  This is all accomplished by the inbuilt Home Sharing feature of iTunes 9.  The Home Sharing feature will only work on PC’s and Mac’s that are located on the same network, whether it’s wireless or wired and all computers participating must be running at least iTunes 9.  Oh, and you will also require an iTunes Account which is pretty much a given if you have purchased anything from the iTunes store.

Once you have created your Home Share, you can then navigate to the second PC or Mac and do the same.  It will recognise that the host home share has already been setup and should begin synchronising the library as per the below screen captures.

Below is the official video from Apple showing Home Sharing in Action.  It’s definitely worth the watch.

Is there room for improvement? Sure there is, but iTunes 9 is a good start in introducing some of these new features and am sure there will be improvements to these in later revisions.

Have you updated to iTunes 9 yet?  You can access the download from the Apple website here, and why not? It’s free!