Pump it up, while your feet are stompin’, and the jam is pumpin’, ahhheeeem

Apple released iTunes 8.1 on Wednesday to coincide with the release of the new iPod Shuffle. Initially we expected Genius to spread it’s wings to accommodate Movies and TV Shows, this didn’t happen. Why Apple pulled it at the last minute remains to be seen. What we were promised though was a much quicker iTunes, obviously support for the new Shuffle, CD ripping in iTunes Plus quality, Autofill for any manually managed iPod, and lasty, iTunes DJ. The last addition being my focus for this article.

Can we really all be DJ’s?

Not quite. Apple have revamped the Party Shuffle playlist, and renamed it iTunes DJ. So what makes it so different? Well the ability to ‘Request songs’ via an iPod Touch or iPhone with Apple’s Remote [iTunes] app. Once you start playing a song in iTunes DJ, you can then open the Remote app on your iPhone or iPod and connect to the Library. You don’t need to have paired your device with iTunes for this to work. Once connected, you’ll see the current song, and also a list of upcoming songs. At the bottom of the screen is a nice fat ‘Request song’ button, hit this and you are taken to a scrolling list of the host machines entire Library. From here you can browse by the usual methods, Artist, Albums etc, or even Search. Once you find a song you fancy, select it, and this will bump the song up to be played next in the DJ queue. If another song is then requested before the intial request has been played, the newer request will be queued behind the first.

Selecting DJ Library then shows 'Now Playing' screen

After choosing a song, it's bumped up the list!

The request is reflected in iTunes

Your right to vote!

Onto another cool feature within iTunes DJ, voting. As I just mentioned the request feature works well enough in it’s own right. By turning on voting though, it gets even better. Everytime a song is requested it receives a vote, you can also hit the heart icon next to any song in the upcoming list to give it a vote. Songs with more votes jump the queue, simple as that!

This is a nice little refresh by Apple. Party Shuffle had gotten very stale to be honest. When it was first introduced I used it quite a bit, but with every subsequent release of iTunes I found myself using it less and less. Eventually it got demoted  from the main Library sidebar, down to the Playlists menu. iTunes DJ gives it a new lease of life, and I can’t wait for the iTunes Partay to begin! Any questions feel free to leave me a comment and I’ll get back to you as soon as I can. In the meantime, fire up Software Update, and get downloading.