Although Apple made almost no feature-related changes in iTunes 12.4, it appears that a bunch of grown-ups have taken over decision making about the interface — and that’s a good thing. Here are some of the changes…
In iTunes 12.4, fewer controls are strewn about at the top of the window; instead those functions, including the store-related commands, are now accessed via menus on the menubar.
View Options appear in their own window; the funky View Options popover menu is no more. As always, you can access View Options either by choosing View > View Options from the menu bar or by pressing Command-J (a keyboard shortcut worth memorizing).
There’s a new menu on the menubar that uses the name of the type of media you are working with (Songs, Movies, Audiobooks, etc.). This menu contains commands that would otherwise be buried in a Control-click contextual menu, such as the one you see when you Control-click a track name.
To choose a type of media, like music or movies, you use a pop-up menu near the left of the toolbar. This menu is reminiscent of the menu found in iTunes 11 and uses words so you don’t have to interpret little icons. Once you choose a media type, you can work with the media that’s stored locally on your computer by clicking the My button (like My Music or My Movies) near the center of the toolbar; when you do, the sidebar (much like the fabled and beloved sidebar in iTunes of old) appears.
One navigational hurdle that’s difficult to overcome intuitively is when you’ve got an iPhone or other iOS device selected (which you do by choosing a device from the iconic device pop-up menu near the left of the toolbar). When a device’s settings occupy the iTunes window, to go back to some other part of iTunes you need to click the new Back button, which looks sort-of like a left-pointing arrow or a chevron <. The Back < button appears at the left of the toolbar.
All of this improved navigation should be easy to figure out, but because it’s not what Kirk described in his “Take Control of iTunes 12: The FAQ,” we are working on an update to the book (but we are also aware that Apple may make an important iTunes-related announcement at WWDC later this month, and we’ll be taking that into account, too, as we plan the update).
And here’s a final tip: if you’ve lost your Recent Updates list for podcasts, you can learn how to get it back from Kirk’s recent Macworld article, Ask the iTunes Guy: Changes in iTunes 12.4.