The good news for anyone with an extensive, carefully curated iTunes library is that you’d be hard-pressed to identify any longstanding iTunes features that Apple has actually removed. Head to Preferences and check the box to restore the iTunes Store and its familiar interface, including ads for new releases, curated lists, and charts. By default, Catalina doesn’t even offer access to the iTunes Store in the app’s sidebar, regardless of whether you’re using a fresh install or a library imported over from the Mojave version of iTunes. Music puts Apple Music front-and-center rather than tacking it on to a manager for a local media library-the first time you open it, you’ll be asked to subscribe to Apple Music if you haven’t already, same as in Music on iOS. It benefits from shedding the features it does lose, but there’s still a lot going on here. Music still pulls triple duty as a local music library manager and CD ripper, a music store where you pay once for music files and music videos that you can then download forever (still called the “iTunes Store,” one of the few places where the old name appears to survive), and a client app for the a la carte Apple Music streaming service. Music is the app that comes the closest to being as complex and overloaded as iTunes was, and it actually does appear to be an AppKit app based on the same codebase as iTunes (the icon is near-identical, too, though it trades its colorful outer ring for a soft white gradient). Apple has published a support document detailing the transition from iTunes to all these separate apps, but we'll cover the basics here (with an emphasis on people who have been using iTunes for a long time to handle all their media, not just people who use it as a streaming client for Apple Music). Apple says iTunes will continue to exist as it currently is on Windows, and presumably the iTunes versions on older-but-still-supported macOS releases will continue to receive updates to fix security holes and keep them compatible with Apple’s media stores and streaming libraries. But it makes for an unwieldy piece of software, and it’s telling that iTunes’ core functionality is split up between five or six different apps on an iPhone or iPad, since Apple had the opportunity to rebuild everything from scratch for mobile.Ĭatalina splits iTunes’ core features out into four apps-Music, Podcasts, and TV handle the media stuff, while the Finder takes over management, system restores, and backups of iPods, iPhones, and other devices. It’s impressive, in the sense that it has continued to add new stuff while still supporting the same basic local MP3 player/music store/iPod management that iTunes has handled for close to two decades. Over the years, iTunes has gone from local music player, MP3 store, and iPod-syncer to a gigantic, shambling piece of software that also handles Apple Music streaming, video and podcast downloads, iPhone and iPad updates and software management, and tons more. There’s nothing Apple makes that people enjoy complaining about as much as iTunes (though the butterfly keyboard might come close).
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