As part of the beta build of Mac OS X Yosemite back in July, iTunes 12 has recently got a revamped version by Apple for beta testers, just ahead of the OS X Yosemite October launch on 16th. According to the update, the newest version of iTunes 12 adopts a cleaner and flatter look that does away with a lot of shadows and textures, in which way it seems to match better with OS X Yosemite.
In order to help you get a closer look at this redesigned iTunes 12, here we round up some most important new features of iTunes 12 that you may be curious about.
- See Also: Top 10 Tips to Get Most Out of iTunes 12
An Elegant New Look of iTunes 12
As expected, the revamped storefront brings a new flattened look by taking several design elements from iOS 7. As we can see, the iTunes icon on version 12 has been changed from blue to red, while the card-style layout of featured music, movies, apps and TV shows on the top bar has been replaced with a flatter scrollable banner in iTunes 12.
Currently, all of the flat interface elements can be found in main content page as well as individual movie, TV show, music pages in iTunes 12.
New Family Sharing Feature of iTunes 12
Aside from the new design, another big improvement of iTunes 12 is that Apple has added the new Family Sharing feature to iTunes 12.
Firstly introduced in June, Family Sharing is a new feature of iOS 8 and OS X Yosemite to share movies, TV shows, songs, apps, etc purchased from iTunes Store with up to six family members. That's to say, if one member of the family buys a movie from iTunes, the whole family can enjoy it on their devices without repurchasing.
Tips: If there are more than 6 people in your family you want to share iTunes movie purchases with, you can use ViWizard iTunes Video Converter to remove the DRM protection from iTunes movies and convert the protected movie files to un-DRM MP4 format before sharing the movies with different Apple IDs.
Besides, Apple has added some other new features to playlists, fonts, ect in iTunes 11. As mentioned above, the new iTunes 12 is expected to be launched alongside with OS X 10.10 Yosemite at the Oct. 16 special media event of Apple. We will be keeping an eye on any updates to see whether it will surprise us again when it officially arrives then.
Rick Lee has written about business and consumer technology for nearly 25 years. He is the author of more than a dozen books.
