To me the biggest ‘feature’ of the Apple Event was iTunes 9. Okay, Steve Jobs’ reappearance takes a close second. iTunes 9 has been revamped, with special importance to the Store end of it. Here’s what’s new in the latest iTunes 9.

Redesigned Store

Everyone was tired of the aging store, which was designed with music in mind but slowly outgrew itself into Apps, Movies, and whatnot. Apple has completely changed the look, including a much cleaner look, and much better navigation. Albums pop out in their own window, and artist pages have been dramatically improved to give you a much better experience. With a permanent navigation bar at the top, it’s easier to switch between Music, Apps, Movies, and even a direct link to iTunesU.

The Store also gets social features, to share songs via Facebook and Twitter. And finally, there’s a wish list so you can take your time in deciding what you want to purchase. The Store is also far more responsive, now that it’s rendered in WebKit instead of the previously used Quicktime engine. Apple has fixed the iTunes Store.

iTunes LP

Along with the Store revamp comes the much rumoured iTunes LP, which gives you rich content, scrolling lyrics, artwork, music videos, to bring a richer experience for die hard fans of the artist.

The visual experience of the record album returns with iTunes LP. Download select albums and experience a beautifully designed, interactive world right in your iTunes library on a Mac or PC — many are created by the artists. While you listen to your favorite songs, you can dive into animated lyrics and liner notes, watch performance videos, view artist and band photos, and enjoy other bonus materials. And become an even bigger fan.

So far only the most popular artists are available in the new LP format.

Home Sharing

We’ve already been able to share libraries over Bonjour, but Home Sharing takes it up a step further. You can now interact with up to five authorised libraries, including copy media including apps, and automatically have newly purchased items sync over. Compared to the stripped down sharing view of Bonjour in iTunes 8, this one’s a huge step forward. And three cheers to the record companies for allowing Apple to do this!

Genius Mixes

Apple seems to have taken their ‘Genius’ concept to heart, plastering it all over iTunes. New with 9 is the ability to automatically create playlists based on genres, up to 12 of them. You don’t have to select a seed track, and you don’t have to worry about updating them. They’re automatically created and ready to go. And they look gorgeous.

User Interface

Both are active windows.

There are myriad other changes in the way iTunes works and feels. The new theme seems to be ‘white’, with even the window colour sporting a non-standard whitish user interface. This seems to be the new aqua Apple is experimenting with—they always experiment with the iTunes UI. The grid view has been totally butchered into a flat white, and all the options for adjusting artwork size or arranging by Genres and Albums are gone. I will particularly miss the “New” view in the Podcast browser. Applications can now be viewed in Coverflow as well as list view—who would want that? From among the good changes, the browse view is gone, instead bringing in an artist list in the sidebar. It’s much cleaner and way more functional. The floating video controller HUD has the same glossy round look as the QuickTime X player.

My god is this ugly!

It’s sad to note that iTunes does not join Snow Leopard in the code cleanup drive. It’s still not 64bit, nor is it written in Cocoa. Yes it does include WebKit for rendering the store, but it’s still enveloped in a Carbon mess which seems to want to show off the pretty spinning beachball even more. I’m still sticking to Ecoute for playback.

iTunes also comes with some new features for iPhone and iPod Touch syncing, but we’ll discuss that in another post. Weighing in at 82MB for the Mac version, and 88MB for the Windows version, it’s a no brainer download. Apple.com/iTunes/Download.