Since I exclusively listen to music ripped from my CD collection, I'm very wary of iTunes updates. I'm in continual fear that Apple will jettison the features that support that to continue pushing people to their rent-a-song service.
These are essential iTunes features for me. If any of these were to go away I'd have a much poorer experience listening to my collection:
- Ripping CDs — I don't do rented digital music (though I very occasionally buy single songs from Amazon, not iTunes)
- Smart playlists — almost the only way I listen to my collection
- Star ratings of songs — essential for building my smart playlists (and since album ratings and song ratings are useless together, I only use song ratings)
- The Grouping metadata field — also essential for building my smart playlists
I don't recall ever seeing "iTunes Device Support Update" before (probably just wasn't paying attention) so I'm wary of running this update. Apple's traditionally woeful release notes offer no comfort with the plain vanilla description “ensures proper updating and restoring for iOS devices using iTunes for Mac.” Great.
Anyone see any functional changes to iTunes 12.8 in High Sierra after this Device Support Update, especially to the features above? Or is it like
@TheIntruder says and it just replaces those three files?