iTunes 8 – are Apple bringing us wireless iTunes speakers soon?

I fired up iTunes 8 which seems a nice incremental update… but you wonder if all Apple apps will be exactly the same single unified app one day, what with all the feature overlaps. Genius seems to be working, not sure I’ll use it much.

I noticed that where previously I had some double entries of albums in my library, one on a shared NAS and one on my local HD (local one being a re-download from iTunes – yes they can let you do that if you have a problem!), iTunes has made them both point to the same shared NAS version. An annoyance I’m sure some will complain about – “lost” music is possible depending on how iTunes decided it was a duplicate, although I imagine they did this because it is an itunes purchase and those tracks have unique ids.

ANYWAY… I had a nose around to see what else is different. I noticed this in the iTunes preferences:

I don’t recall seeing “Allow iTunes control from remote speakers” before. Perhaps I’m wrong. Anyway this, coupled with the Remote app for iPod Touch / iPhone and the lack of AirTunes/Airport Express refresh for years surely points to some future wireless speaker + wifi repeated product, that you will be able to use to control itunes either directly with buttons on the speakers, a local remote, or over wifi to the speakers (even if out of range of your iTunes machine) via iPod or iPhone.

I just hope they make humidity resilient versions for the bathroom!