iTunes 8.1 is now faster and more responsive. You will enjoy noticeable improvements when working with large libraries, browsing the iTunes Store, preparing to sync with iPod or iPhone, and optimizing photos for syncing.

In addition, iTunes 8.1 provides many other improvements and bug fixes, including:

• Supports syncing with iPod shuffle (3rd generation).
• Allows friends to request songs for iTunes DJ.
• Adds Genius sidebar for your Movies and TV Shows.
• Improves performance when downloading iTunes Plus songs.
• Provides AutoFill for manually managed iPods.
• Allows CDs to be imported at the same sound quality as iTunes Plus.
• Includes many accessibility improvements.
• Allows iTunes U and the iTunes Store to be disabled separately using Parental Controls.

The nice thing about iTunes decisions is that we can provide you with patches to counter them. We have one such patch already for Mac iTunes 8 for iPod touch. We’ll be working out the full suite of patches for all the combinations over the next week.

Begun the Apple-Hackers iTunes Wars have. [iPhone Dev Team Blog]

If you go back to the original divorce papers, Apple says that NBC actually wanted to double the wholesale price of TV shows, making them $4.99. Even if you don't take Apple's word, NBC CEO Jeff Zucker said that what NBC wanted was a cut of hardware sales and to "take one show, it didn't matter which one it was, and experiment and sell it for $2.99."

That's a lot different than the pricing structure revealed yesterday. The $2.99 pricepoint is for high-def TV shows from every channel, not simply a popular show NBC tried to milk for more money. It's also commensurate with the elevated price for HD movie rentals or DRM-free tracks (though the DRM-free tax is bullshit). Yes, there is some flexibility in TV show pricing, but it's flexibility that benefits users—older shows are cheaper, and people get a discount for buying a Season Pass, which is pretty logical.

The price hikes that NBC asked for effectively didn't happen, and we can be damned certain they're not getting a cut of the hardware. They even come out and say that they didn't get all the pricing options they wanted. So, even if you consider selling older shows for 99 cents to be a concession on Apple's part, I fail to see how that's Apple bending to NBC's iron will: The pricing structure is not arbitrary (a show doesn't cost more just 'cause it's popular); we're not being asked to pay more than we used to pay for the same stuff; and the higher $2.99 price for HD or looong TV shows falls in line with how Apple has been treating HD video. See also: [Bits]

Instructions: To install it on Mac, put it in /Users/username/Library/iTunes/iTunes Plug-ins

It's all about bitrate: How much data is packed into a file, described as bits per second. Generally speaking, a higher bitrate translates into higher quality audio and video, though quality can also be affected by codec—the encoding and compression technique that was used to make and read the file—so bitrate is not an absolute mark of quality, but it's still a very good indicator.

You're probably most familiar with this bitrate business when it comes to ripping your CDs. When you shove a CD into your computer, your ripping program will ask what format you want and what bitrate you want. A song ripped at a higher bitrate will sound better, with more presence and detail, but it does take up more space.

The same principle applies with video, though it's actually a bigger deal, because it's easier to see quality differences in video than it is to hear differences in audio. The bits make a huge difference when you get into fast moving stuff like sports or action movies—to be frank, they'll look like splattered, smeared shit in highly compressed low-bitrate vids. This chart below, expertly crafted by George Ou at ZDNet provides a solid starting point for comparison, with average bitrates of most digital video available.

As you can see, regular DVD runs at about 6-8 megabits per second. High-def iTunes content, despite having a higher resolution, is half that, a mere 4Mbps. Vudu's current HD movies is also about 4Mbps, if you've got the pipes. Xbox Live Marketplace has the highest bitrate—and indeed, often gets props for its quality—at close to 6.8Mbps. On the other hand, standard-def movies on the Netflix Roku box max out at around 2.2Mbps—and are often delivered in lower qualities because of bandwidth constraints. iTunes standard def TV shows run around 1.5Mbps. Now, consider that Blu-ray is a mean 40Mbps and you see that the definition of "HD" is suddenly remarkably vague.

That's a pissload of numbers. What does that mean?

This comparison test we ran in February pretty much shows you what's wrong: No matter how awesome MPEG-4 compression—or whatever the codec of the month is—gets, it can't work miracles when it's missing bits. It's why Vudu, for instance, is testing out a new closer-to-real-HD service—that they've revealed to us has three times the bitrate of any other download service on the market, meaning it should be close to 20Mbps—that will take hours to deliver to your home. But even then, the notion that it would truly rival Blu-ray is totally laughable.

It's not just download services giving you this watered-down so-called "HD lite", either. Comcast was busted cramming three HD channels into the space of two, resulting in crappy looking HDTV, and the satellite guys adding a million HD channels a year aren't much better.

Now that you understand what makes or breaks an HD picture—the amount of data— it's probably no surprise to you that the major reason everyone is peddling subpar HD is bandwidth. HD content is pipe-bustingly huge—a standard-def Battlestar Galactica file on iTunes is 520MB and takes about 15 minutes to download via a strong cable connection. The 720p HD download is 1.4GB and takes 40 minutes or so for your hard drive to completely swallow. The Blu-ray version of the same ep might be 10 times that—like 14GB. Putting that in more context, a single TV episode would take up twice the space as the average dual-layer DVD movie.

Right now, we don't have the broadband infrastructure to support it, and who knows when we will? Hell, the people with the best chance of giving us that added bandwidth—the major ISPs like Comcast and AT&T—are doing just the opposite: Implementing usage caps that will mean less HD downloading. The sad thing is, they probably won't even use the added bandwidth to make their own HD TV channels look better.

Go to Terminal and type:

defaults write com.apple.iTunes show-store-arrow-links -bool FALSE

That will hide the links. To kill 'em forever, type:

defaults delete com.apple.iTunes show-store-arrow-links

[maxosxhints Thanks Rami!]

Update: Thanks to the commenters, here's the windows fix.

Matt says that doing a clean install (completely uninstalling your previous version of iTunes before loading up iTunes 8) has resulted in no BSOD issues for him on Vista 64-bit, but that hasn't been tested by the public at large yet. Apple's asking for dump files to figure out where the problem's coming from, but until they post an update, I predict rioting! Mayhem! Pillaging of Apple stores all around the country! Or just a bunch of Windows-based iTunes users grumbling into the night about how all the fancy schmancy graphics in the world can't make up for crappy software testing. [Apple Forums]

iTunes 8, complete with fancy Genius Playlists and grid view, just went live via Apple Software Update and on Apple.com. Go grab it if you're interested, and let us know how the fancy playlists work out for you. Hit the jump for our initial impressions and a gallery of screenshots.

First impression: this thing takes FOREVER to install and requires a restart. I want those 20 minutes of my life back, Apple. This is a media player for god's sake.

Second impression: it's eating all of my system resources going through my 120GB of music for Genius Playlists. This had better be worth it. It's using over 300MB of my system memory and it appears that it's going to take a good hour to handle this. You've been warned.

Grid view is pretty useless as far as I'm concerned. It makes sorting through your music collection next to impossible if it's even sort of large, and when you click an album to play it you can't see the album's tracklist. Couple that with the fact that half my albums don't have art attached and you have a feature I'm guaranteed to never use.

The new visualizer is AWESOME. I love it.

Is this a bug? The icon that goes next to whatever song is playing in list view doesn't seem to appear anymore. If I'm looking at a list of songs, the only way to see which is playing is to look at the top window and then find that title in the list. That's no good. Nevermind, it's back now. Not sure what the hell was going on there.

Update: about 40% into this Genius business. It's sloooowwwww.

Ho-kay! After like 3 hours Genius Playlists are working for me. My first try was selecting an ambient track (Tim Hecker; I listen to nerdy music, OK?). The playlist it came up with was full of indie rock (a lot of The National and Interpol for some reason) and made no sense whatsoever. Strike one.

Selecting a more well-known indie pop band (The Bird and the Bee) had better results, putting up a bunch of stuff of the same genre. Andre 3000 brought up a playlist of mostly hip hop, which is good, although it had some random wildcards in there as well (Tortoise? Really?).

I think the more mainstream and well known the music you use to source the playlists, the better. Until more people use it and Apple gets more data for more obscure acts, you're going to get random results. This is because it uses metadata from the songs; it doesn't actually analyze what's going on musically. This is why the recommendations made by Pandora are so awesome. In time, Genius playlists should get more useful, but I think I'll still stick to Pandora when I want to mix things up.

As for the recommended tracks in the sidebar, more often than not I found that it recommended stuff I already have. Maybe that's because most of my music wasn't purchased through iTunes (ahem), but most of the time the "Top Songs You're Missing" were in the album I was already listening to. [Apple]

As expected, El Jobso just revealed the new iTunes 8 on stage at the "Let Us Rock" event. It's a sizable upgrade for iTunes, so let's take a look at the new features, shall we?

Genius Playlists
Yep, just like we'd heard about from Kevin Rose. These go through your music, analyzes its structure and sound, and creates playlists on the fly that it thinks goes together well. It's like shuffle with a brain. It can also recommend music that you might like from the iTunes store. It uses both an algorithm to learn what you like as well as data from other iTunes users. Don't worry, it's all anonymous. No one will know how much you love Third Eye Blind.

Grid View
There's also a new grid view that lets you sort through your tunes and videos by cover art, letting you play right from the grid.

Magnetosphere Visualizer
This Magnetosphere rumor turned out to be true as well. It wasn't mentioned in the keynote or the press release, but we confirmed it both with an interview with Apple and with using it in the software itself. It is as beautiful as advertised.

HD Shows
As we noted, you can now get TV shows in HD from the iTunes store.

iTunes 8 is available as of today at Apple.com.

Apple Announces iTunes 8

Features Apple's New Breakthrough Genius Technology

SAN FRANCISCO, Sept. 9 /PRNewswire-FirstCall/ Apple(R) today announced iTunes(R) 8, the next major release of Apple's ubiquitous music and video player for Macs and PCs which is seamlessly integrated with the most popular online content store in the world (http://www.itunes.com). iTunes 8 includes the new breakthrough Genius feature, which lets you automatically create playlists from songs in your music library that go great together — with just one click. Genius helps music fans rediscover favorite songs in their existing music library and suggests related music on the iTunes Store they might want to add to their music collection. iTunes 8 features new ways of viewing your music and video libraries, and adds television programs in stunning high definition for sale on the iTunes Store.

Using Apple's breakthrough Genius feature is easy-select any song, click the Genius button, and iTunes instantly creates a playlist of songs that go great together from your own library. You can preview the playlist Genius creates, refresh the list to choose different songs and save Genius playlists to enjoy again later. You can even create Genius Playlists on-the-go with the new iPod(R) classic, iPod touch, iPod nano and iPhone(TM). The Genius sidebar appears right in iTunes and recommends music from the iTunes Store that you don't already have, based on the songs you select.

When you turn on iTunes 8's new Genius feature, information about your music library is anonymously sent to the iTunes Store, where it is combined with the anonymously-gathered knowledge from millions of other iTunes users and processed through Apple-developed algorithms. The Genius results, specifically tailored to your personal music library, are sent back to your computer to enable users to automatically create Genius playlists in iTunes and on your iPods, even when they are not connected to the Internet.

iTunes 8's new visual browsing interface displays your music and video libraries using your album and video covers, and also provides a great way to navigate your movies, TV shows, iPhone apps, podcasts and audiobooks.

The iTunes Store has become the world's most popular online TV store and features an incredible selection of over 30,000 episodes from ABC, CBS, The CW, FOX, NBC and over 70 cable networks including Bravo, Comedy Central, Disney Channel, ESPN, FX, HBO, MTV, Nickelodeon, Sci Fi, Showtime and USA. With iTunes 8, television fans can now watch their favorite programs from ABC, NBC and Showtime in stunning HD for just $2.99 per episode, perfect for viewing on their Mac(R) or PC, or on their widescreen TV with Apple TV.

The iTunes Store is the world's most popular online music, TV and movie store with a catalog of 8.5 million songs, over 30,000 TV episodes and over 2,500 films including 600 in stunning high definition video. With Apple's legendary ease of use, pioneering features such as iTunes Movie Rentals, integrated podcasting support, iMix playlist sharing, the ability to turn previously purchased tracks into complete albums at a reduced price, and seamless integration with iPod and iPhone, the iTunes Store is the best way for Mac and PC users to legally discover, purchase and download music and video online.

Pricing & Availability

iTunes 8 for Mac and Windows includes the iTunes Store and is available as a free download from (http://www.itunes.com). Purchase and download of songs and videos from the iTunes Store requires a valid credit card from a financial institution in the country of purchase. Video availability varies by country.

After eons of offering only movies in HD, the iTunes store is at last selling TV shows the way they're meant to be watched. Starting today, you can buy HD episodes of TV shows for $2.99. NBC and Apple have kissed and made up as well—Monk, The Office, Battlestar Galactica, 30 Rock, Heroes are all back, and yes, you can watch Sylar cut heads open in HD. All the details on NBC's homecoming:

NBC Universal Returns to the iTunes Store

All-Star Lineup Includes 'Heroes,' 'The Office,' 'Battlestar Galactica' & '30 Rock'

Top Rated NBC Comedies & Dramas Now Available on iTunes in Stunning HD

NEW YORK and SAN FRANCISCO, Sept. 9 /PRNewswire-FirstCall/ — Apple(R) and NBC Universal today announced the return of NBC programming to the iTunes(R) Store (http://www.itunes.com) including NBC networks' top 10 series available immediately for purchase and download in both standard definition and stunning high definition. iTunes customers can choose programming from NBC, USA Network, SCI FI Channel, Bravo, Sleuth and NBC News including favorites such as the award-winning and critically acclaimed "Heroes," and the Emmy award-winning programs "The Office," "Battlestar Galactica" and "30 Rock." NBCU standard definition television shows on the iTunes Store are $1.99 per episode and HD programs are available for just one dollar more at $2.99 per episode and select library content is available for $.99. Additional NBCU programming from Oxygen, Telemundo, Mun2 and NBC Sports will be available on iTunes soon.

"The return of our shows to iTunes is terrific news for everyone who loves television and the ease and convenience of Apple's iTunes," said Jeff Zucker, President and CEO, NBC Universal. "And now, by offering consumers a variety of new options, our fans have even more ways to enjoy our content."

"We are thrilled that NBC is back on iTunes in time for the Fall TV season," said Steve Jobs, Apple's CEO. "NBC has some of TV's most popular shows and now customers can purchase and download them from iTunes in SD or stunning HD."

iTunes customers can also purchase a Season Pass which allows viewers to buy an entire season of programming at a discounted price. In addition, NBC Universal is offering one free episode from each of their top series, available in either SD or HD, on the iTunes Store for the next two weeks. The premiere episodes of upcoming NBC shows, such as "Knight Rider," "My Own Worst Enemy" and "Kath & Kim" will be available on iTunes a week before their broadcast premieres later in September and October, with subsequent episodes available the day after broadcast. NBC is also making full episodes of several vintage television shows available on iTunes for $.99, including "The A-Team," "The Alfred Hitchcock Hour," "Miami Vice," "Kojak" and the original "Battlestar Galactica."

The iTunes Store is the world's most popular online music, TV and movie store with a catalog of over 8.5 million songs, over 30,000 TV episodes and over 2,500 films including 600 in stunning high definition video. With Apple's legendary ease of use, pioneering features such as iTunes Movie Rentals, integrated podcasting support, iMix playlist sharing, the ability to turn previously purchased tracks into complete albums at a reduced price, and seamless integration with iPod(R) and iPhone(TM), the iTunes Store is the best way for Mac(R) and PC users to legally discover, purchase and download music and video online.

Pricing & Availability

iTunes 8 for Mac and Windows includes the iTunes Store and is available as a free download from (http://www.itunes.com). Purchase and download of songs and videos from the iTunes Store requires a valid credit card from a financial institution in the country of purchase. Video availability varies by country.

NBC Universal is one of the world's leading media and entertainment companies in the development, production, and marketing of entertainment, news and information to a global audience. Formed in May 2004 through the combining of NBC and Vivendi Universal Entertainment, NBC Universal owns and operates a valuable portfolio of news and entertainment networks, a premier motion picture company, significant television production operations, a leading television stations group and world-renowned theme parks. NBC Universal is 80 percent owned by General Electric and 20 percent owned by Vivendi.

Apple ignited the personal computer revolution in the 1970s with the Apple II and reinvented the personal computer in the 1980s with the Macintosh.

Today, Apple continues to lead the industry in innovation with its award-winning computers, OS X operating system and iLife and professional

applications. Apple is also spearheading the digital media revolution with its iPod portable music and video players and iTunes online store, and has entered the mobile phone market with its revolutionary iPhone.

(C) 2008 Apple Inc. All rights reserved. Apple, the Apple logo, Mac, Mac OS, Macintosh, iTunes, iPod and iPhone are trademarks of Apple. Other company and product names may be trademarks of their respective owners.

Unfortunately, the dude who's reporting this says he had been using iTunes 6.0 (so why click on the bizarro download button now?) so he's not sure what's new, only that it's a "HUGE upgrade" from 6.0. His fear of Apple's swift and terrible fury is conveniently preventing him from offering up a download.

iTunes 8 is expected to be packed with new features: a Pandora-like "Genius" smart playlist, HD TV downloads, a trippy visualizer, and maybe one other surprise feature. Right now we're kinda skeptical, so if you managed to grab it, please let us know. [UFailPix via AppleInsider - Thanks Erick!]

Other Kevin Rose predictions such as a "trippy" visualization with "planet like objects" and downloadable TV shows in HD haven't been confirmed, nor have previous rumors of an iTunes subscription service. But that differently-shaped iPod nano seems to be a lock. [MacRumors]