So far, I’ve refused to upgrade to Itunes 11, given the bad reaction and my dislike for what I’ve seen of the new format.
I’m going to be upgrading my MacBook soon, and I know that Itunes 11 will come installed on it. Im guessing there is some way to monkey around so that I can stick with Itunes 10, but I’m wondering how much trouble it’s worth at this point.
What d’you think?
I actually like it a lot. Much better that 10. I have no idea what problems people are having with it.
Nobody likes change, and whining about iTunes is practically the national pastime.
More seriously, with the old sidebar gone, it’s a lot harder to find things; functions are sort of scattered around randomly, and they’re context sensitive now – you may just not be able to get to the store from where you are without going through another mode first, for example. It’s pretty much exactly what Apple’s own guidelines tell developers NOT to do.
All that said, it’s a music/video library and device loader, and it does everything that 95% of the population will ever want to do easily. Unless you’re the sort of person who spends hours a week managing their music, I can’t see it being a major life decision to switch.
Well, I don’t spend hours a week on average managing my iTunes data, but there have been some weeks when I have spent many hours with it. I fill in the “sort” fields for every track so that everything appears exactly in the order I want.
I’m pretty anal about my iTunes data as well, and I don’t have any more trouble organizing stuff in this version than the previous one. The metadata works the same as before. I’ve actually spotted one small improvement: Albums with more than one disc can now be displayed as disc 1, disc 2 etc. as separate sections in the albums and artists views.
Beyond that, everything just looks and feels fresher and nicer than before, at least in IMHO.
(The only section I’ve seen where there isn’t a direct link to the store, btw, is in the iPod view, where you organize what gets synced to your iPod. Though I’ll admit that I might not have explored all features as much as some. I haven’t used it at all for movies yet.)
I’ve never seen an Itunes version that was an improvement on what went before. Mostly it’s small annoyances and downgrades (i.e. less attractive interface); occasionally it’s something major (like not being able to save your library to CDs because Apple wants you to buy Cloud space).
When Apple is not actively being a pest to try to squeeze extra dollars out of their customers, they’re making changes for the same apparent reason as other makers of electronics/computer items - for fear the public will perceive the product as old and tired unless there is a New And Improved software or hardware version coming out at least every 3-6 months.
It’s tiresome.
I’m not sure what you’re talking about here. I’ve burned parts of my library to CD with every version of iTunes including 11; that feature moves around a bit, but it’s never been removed.
11 keeps crashing on me. 
Sometimes within seconds of booting up, sometimes after letting me play a few songs.
Depending on the age of your computer, that sounds like it could potentially be to memory bloat. If iTunes 11 uses significantly more memory than old versions, it may just be running out and dying.
Next time it happens:
Run Console.app (it’s in Applications/Utilities), click “Show Log List” in the upper left hand corner (if it says “Hide Log List”, it’s already shown), and click “All Messages” at the top. Look for things with “iTunes” in the name, and see if it gives you any hints.
If not, look in System Diagnostic reports (lower down in the log list), see if there’s a crash log there with iTunes in the name, and look at the top of it. Crash logs are technicalese, but sometimes there’s a fairly clear “this is what happened” statement at the top.
It’s not running out of memory. Macs, like all computers made in the last 15 years or so, have virtual memory in them, and running out of memory (as opposed to swapping to disk, which would slow things down but not crash) is almost impossible.
If a…ahem…friend of ours was that sort of person, what music player might you recommend to them?
Seriously? You would go back to iTunes 1.0?
Unfortunately, I’m not that sort of person, either, but I see that WinAmp gets recommended a lot for Windows users. If you’re a Mac or Linux user, I don’t know.
On a vaguely related ramble: My consumer media interaction is pretty much limited “store it, burn it, stream it, sort it, let me make playlists out of it, and get it onto my devices,” for which iTunes is more than adequate.
Usually the signs that you’re not going to like iTunes are (a) when you spend a lot of time with metadata (iTunes batch editing is a bit clumsy, and it can’t easily be scripted unless you know Applescript on the Mac), (b)want to arrange the physical media files yourself (iTunes HATES that–you will break the library doing it), (c)have a device that doesn’t interact with it (i.e. you have to manually drag and drop stuff, which is sort of a special case of (b)), or (d) trying to have the device (rather than the iTunes library) be the definitive source of media.
Almost everybody who personally comes to me for help with iTunes doing “weird stuff” are geek types who have been doing (b): “I moved the music folder, and it doesn’t work!” “I deleted everything that wasn’t a media file and it doesn’t work!” “I rearranged the music into folders the way I like and it doesn’t work!” “I deleted the entire iTunes music folder, and it cleared my device when I synced! Why did it make me lose all my music!” “I drag-and-dropped a bunch of music from my device into the music folder and it doesn’t work”
If you like doing that stuff, best to either keep two copies of everything, or skip using iTunes altogether. iTunes is meant for that 80-90% of the population that just want stuff to work, and doesn’t care about the implementation. There’s nothing wrong with not being in that population–what gets folks in trouble is being in the “needs more control” camp and trying to use iTunes anyway.
(d) is the dreaded “I got a new computer, and didn’t bother to copy the library from the old one, since my music is on my iPod” syndrome. iTunes can handle that case, but only for music from the store or iTunes match (i.e. music for which is knows for sure you’ve got a license). Protect (back up and maintain) your iTunes libraries, folks! (This applies only to folks who sync with a computer, which is no longer required as of iOS 5 (6?). If your iOS device does it’s backups/music transactions only from the cloud, and you never sync it with a computer, you won’t have any “unknown origin” music on it, anyway, and you can get it all back from anywhere.)
Second this. As far as iTunes is concerned, your music lives on your computer, and your iPod (or other device) is just a place where it hangs out.
It sure would be nice if that was explained in those words somewhere in iTunes itself as an instruction. I’ve been using it sporadically for years and often get frustrated by having to learn it all over again (not to mention find the commands I’m seeking). My family has several iPods that have to be synced to different sets of music and it’s a bitch keeping it all straight.
Maybe I’m just the kind of customer Apple had in mind, because for whatever reason I understood this instinctively. It never made sense to me that someone would assume that an easily lost or damaged pocket-sized portable device (which I drop about five times a day) – and one with limited storage capacity, to boot – would be the principal repository for a digital library.
My only complaint about pre-11 iTunes has been that it doesn’t automatically populate the metadata with complete, accurate, and consistent information. I want my iTunes library to look exactly like my L.P. record cabinet with all the information in each and every sleeve – composers, dates, etc.
It isn’t that, so much, I do see that principle easily. What keeps tripping me up is that you’re not “adding” music to the device. A sync command replaces what’s on the device with whatever is marked to be synced to that device–assuming you have all the settings to do that correctly tweaked.
How do people with kids manage this? My kids are 14 and 12. They grew up listening to my music so they like a lot of it. But they don’t love it all, and I don’t love all of theirs. But it’s all in one iTunes account (like it was all on our shelves) and we all have access. As the kids grew we went from one old-school iPod to (deep breath) two iPads, two iPod touches, one iPhone, and several old iPods and Shuffles. I’ve been trying to use the “synced only checked music…” option but is there a better way? Just adding someone’s new song to their device is not a simple matter.
Eventually the kids will have their own iTunes accounts but does that mean we’ll have to buy all their music again? I haven’t done anything about this because I’m afraid the answer to that question will be yes.
I don’t have kids, but for my wife’s iPods, I use codes in the “notes” section and create automated playlists based on those.
Yes. Smart playlists is the way to go. It’s also the way to go if you have a zillion songs in your library and limited space on your pod (like me).
No, you won’t. Copying music files across to a new computer and dumping it into the iTunes library there works fine. There’s no DRM on iTunes music files.
Can you explain “smart” playlist?
I’m glad there’s DRM, that’s good to know. What if I don’t have a new computer? Can I do this by just creating a new library on the same computer?