Like Marley, I am liking the new release more, the more I use it. I think it’s actually a pretty good upgrade.
I like the list of entries with the album art showing on the left. That way I get the best of both worlds. I have something like 10,000 tracks. Having album art makes it more than just a giant wall of text.
I’ve been seeming to just keep “Artists” clicked at the top.
I like how it just lists the cover and artist in one, simple left-side column; then when you select the artist, it shows all their albums, bigger covers and the playlist, nicely separated.
I also like that you can hide the sidebar (alt-command-s). The only time I use it is for playlists or doing more elaborate syncing with my iOS devices, which is only so often. Maybe you could do this before, but it was hidden by default, and I do like it better.
Really don’t get a lot of the seemingly knee-jerk beef with this one.
To be honest, once I put back the bits that are automatically hidden (sidebar, column browser) and set it to a song list view it feels just like the old version but with a new lick of paint. All a bit pointless really.
It is also possibly the most incorrectly named piece of software out there.
Is there a way to get back the way search used to work?
Meaning, to find duplicates that “show duplicates” can’t find, I used to search for a track name, it would show a list of all tracks with that name in the main window, then it was easy to listen to both versions to delete the unwanted one, I had all versions right in front of me.
Now with the way search works, I have to input my search words, click on one of the tracks, then input again my search words, click on another of the tracks, then try to remember if I like this version better since I can’t instantly compare the two like before. (and hope I didn’t click again on the same track)
Is there a way to get around that?
I guess I could create a smart playlist but it seems dumb to have to go to that length just to delete a couple of songs.
I can find some by arranging all songs from my library by name, but if the duplicate song names don’t begin by the same word, it’s useless.
BleizDu, just search for a word or string of words that all the song versions have in common. For instance, if I want to see all versions of “The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face,” I can just search “First” or “First Time” (without the quotes).
When I put in “First Time io” by accident, before I hit enter, it brought up Celine Dion and Leona Lewis’ "Deluxe Spirit Version"s.
When I put in “First Time ch” it brought up the version by George Michael.
Pretty nifty.
I hate that when I click on a song, whether it’s playing or just highlighted, the album cover isn’t a decent size on the left bottom any more. Sure, there is a tiny picture in the middle top, but that seems to be JUST the song that is playing. When I play with my gigantic library, seeing the album cover without having to switch my view was a very helpful thing.
I can’t believe it still didn’t incorporate tagging. Granted, I’ve been using iTunes for nearly 10 years now so I can live without it and it’d be a lot of work to do it now, but still, it’d be so much easier than having to come up with all these crazy-ass workarounds I have to do (special groupings, genres, notes).
So is all this bitching about the PC version or the Apple version, or both? Cause I’m being prompted to upgrade on my PC and so far I’ve said no.
You can either:
-
Minimize the player to that little floating bar and click on the album thumbnail to open up a scalable album cover that also as play controls when you hover over.
-
Or, if you want the iTunes in expanded view up at the same time, you can go to the Window menu, and check Show MiniPlayer, then you’ll have both the expanded view and MiniPlayer.
From there, you can close the MiniPlayer, expanded iTunes library or the Album cover to taste.
That’s helpful if I am playing a song, but when I am just organizing my library, I miss the album cover on the bottom left. When I do what you suggested without a song playing, I still can’t see the album cover.
so, i got the new ipod nano, and the old version of itunes that i had wouldn’t recognize the ipod. which required me to upgrade. wow. i’m really at a loss. the new itunes (itunes 11) is SO bad, that i assumed the internet would be absolutely teeming with tech columnists everywhere chastising apple for releasing such a terrible product! but i guess some people are okay with convoluted programs because it gives them a sort of exclusivity, where they’re in-the-know, and cool. or something. really, i can’t explain it, and i won’t try. instead, i’ll explain what i have discovered, in the context of using an ipod (a nano, specifically) with itunes 11, that makes it such a terrible misfire.
with my old nano, i could use any playlist that i had in my library, and put the whole playlist onto my nano, or even several playlists. i could make new playlists in my nano, and then either drag or copy-paste any subset of songs/podcasts i liked into that playlist on my nano. now you can’t do this. for some reason, they’ve separated everything onto separate pages that you can’t have open at the same time. it’d be like if you wanted to go to two separate directories in a file browser, and had to manually navigate between them to get back and forth, instead of being able to have each location open in a separate window. personally, i preferred having all the “locations” visible in a list on the left side (library, with podcasts, music, videos, whatnot listed in that category, but with the ability to see everything in the library at once, or, if i so desired, only items meeting a specific criteria, such as seeing just podcasts, or just music). i liked being able to quickly, on a single screen, drag from one to another, any playlist, group of playlists, or song/podcast or collection thereof. now not only can i not do that, it outright disallows copy-paste operations between my library and my nano.
as a side note, i will say, if i used my nano for music, as opposed to podcasts to entertain me while i do the dreaded exercise i’m doing for my most important of new year’s resolutions, there are some cool features you can use for automatically syncing that some people will really like (b/c manual file management seems to be falling out of fashion, and can be time-consuming and cumbersome).
but if you listen to podcasts such as ‘fresh air’ and ‘the story’, then you are only interested in about 25% of them, and you inevitably have to manually select the ones you’re interested in. once you’ve done the time-consuming work of selecting them and separating them from the huge selection available under a given program (by program, i mean the radio program, such as ‘fresh air’), by placing them into a playlist, it seems like a very simple request to expect to be able to easily say, and now, put all this material (in said playlist) onto my ipod b/c i want to listen to it on the go. i’m not misguided here. every single previous version of itunes i’ve ever used all the way back to 2004 allowed this type of functionality. so obviously it makes sense to want to do this. in fact, everything on a computer works this way: lists of files, you can select some of them, and then you can group that subset into folders, organized in a tree if you want to get really fancy, and you can copy and paste folders, and nested groups of folders, into other folders, and files into any folder, anywhere in a tree. this goes way back. if you think i’m pining for older times, i think you’re wrong. computers still work this way. our brains still organize information this way. sure, somewhere deep in the computer’s architecture, they’re stored in a much different way, and there are pointers to the locations in memory which handle the part where it appears to be organized that way. but that’s really beside the point.
and let me revisit my point about everything being separated onto its own screen. now, if you want to add something to a playlist, whether or not it’s on the ipod, there’s a very clumsy method you have to use to accomplish it. this is because there’s no way to concurrently have (1) a listing of your playlists displayed on screen and (2) a list of some subset of your media library displayed on screen. you MUST look at them on separate screens, each of which takes the other OFF the screen, thus rendering it impossible to drag a group of songs onto a playlist title. the clumsy workaround they came up with? you have to switch to the playlists screen, then you may select a playlist. then you have to click on a button on the top right, and say “add to”. THEN it allows you to browse around through your media collection to add things to the playlist, which you do by dragging from a (yet different than any other screen we’ve yet encountered) variety of lists of media (each category – podcasts, songs, artists playlists – displays on a separate screen), and you drag from left to right, and when you are done dragging, you have to tell it you’re DONE copying by clicking on a button that says DONE. surely you must already think i’m kidding. this sounds like a great big april fool’s joke, right? i’m dead serious.
if that wasn’t bad enough, there are serious changes to the search feature. one is annoying, the other just plain makes no sense. so, if i am adding to a playlist, by clicking “add to”, and i’m browsing through the “songs” category, and i want to add, let’s say, all songs by ‘cee lo green’, originally itunes had this nifty feature where you typed into the search bar, and whichever list you had displayed eliminated from view anything that didn’t match the search string. you’re all familiar with this, right? well, it doesn’t do that now. instead, it drops down a list of LOCATIONS you can FIND items matching that string. so it’ll give me the following items:artists: cee lo green; albums: ladykiller; songs: (and lists the songs by him). these are in a short-lived drop-down box. i have to make a selection. i can’t interact with the box by dragging from it – it ignores this maneuver. instead, there’s a little plus (+) icon which appears next to any item in the drop-down box when you hover over that line item. in the case of my cee lo example, for which i own only a single album, it can’t even fit the whole drop-down box on the screen, so i have to resort to scrolling within a drop-down box to select a single track. if that isn’t to my liking, i’ll have to select the ‘artist: cee lo green’ item, or ‘album: ladykiller’ item (by ‘select’, i mean, click the ‘(+)’ icon next to the line item in the drop-down box. problem is, it then adds either every song by cee lo green or every song from the album. i’d then have to click DONE to stop editing my playlist, and manually delete the songs i do not wish to include. of course, i could have just stayed in the ‘songs’ screen with every single song i own listed, and scrolled down to cee lo green. but that USED TO BE the beauty of the search feature in itunes. no longer. and here’s the part that just plain makes no sense: if i click on the line item, it doesn’t change the displayed list. in other words, if i click on ‘album: ladykiller’, it doesn’t narrow the list under the ‘songs’ window (from which i am currently ‘add[ing] to’ my playlist) to a list of songs on ‘ladykiller’. which is annoying enough. but even worse, it closes the entire drop-down list (as if i’d clicked outside the drop-down list, as if i’ve changed my mind about my search), ENDS editing of the playlist (the equivalent of clicking on the DONE button), and points the window to the ‘all artists’ display, where it shows the album covers (where available) on the left and a cluster of songs on that album in a list to the right of each. a display i had not navigated to before. and it isn’t automatically scrolled down to the artist or album i selected in the drop-down box. it displays nothing selected, and the list is scrolled to the top. so, in my case, because i’ve got songs by alan menken in my songs collection, it displays a group of songs from the disney animated feature ‘the little mermaid’ whenever i make this unfortunate mistake. and it was a bit confusing at first, b/c it doesn’t actually SAY alan menken anywhere, just ‘the little mermaid’, which obviously doesn’t begin with ‘A’ – i had to think for a moment and go, “OH, they’re the alan menken songs from the little mermaid!”
this is just a small sampling of the really poor design of this program, and the idiosyncracies one must learn to not get totally frustrated using it. in my opinion (and i think some of you share this opinion), you shouldn’t have to figure out completely un-intuitive ways of doing things to use a program. this is poor design, plain and simple, because they’ve made it so incredibly un-intuitive. i feel like some people here are commenting that it’s fine, and they’re commenting about its cosmetic appearance – not talking about how the program actually functions from button press to button press. at every turn this new version of itunes gives infuriating and confounding results like the ones i explained above. i wouldn’t even use this software, or figure out how to use it, if it wasn’t required to manage the music on my ipod. the new version of itunes, however, is actually making me REGRET my ipod purchase. once upon a time, the ipod/itunes pairing made it the best device to use and simultaneously the one easiest to manage. and i’ve tried a couple of other mp3 manufacturers in the past, and i hated managing the content on them. why? oh, usually it was for reasons just like the things i was describing above.
and i’m a pretty tech savvy individual. don’t take me for a casual user. i’m trained in computer science, and dork out on all things tech. so i use a WIDE variety of programs, and tinker in back-end stuff, and customization, and fun little home-written utilities that make computing easier. i’ve used a little of everything. when i tell you this software is bad, i’m not just saying it looks ugly. in fact, it doesn’t. it LOOKS, at first, more or less the same, as the screen is still mostly dominated by alternating white and grey rows of items in a list. it is the basic functionality they really screwed up.
I have always updated I-tunes when it was called for, because of this thread I have not done so, how long can you keep the old version?
I haven’t found it to be as bad as people say. At first, I completely agreed because they changed the entire interface. Then I figured out that they just moved some stuff around and I was able to get it looking almost exactly like the old version and everything got back to normal. View in “Song” view and you get your old list version back.
Same here.
My only annoyance: when selecting a show or movie to view, nothing will happen for a second, as though you haven’t hit play. Then the screen will change to the viewer. Again, just an annoyance with the lag. Otherwise, it’s just plain old bloated iTunes.
There is indeed an easier way: select whatever you want to, right-click and choose “New Playlist from selection”. You can also “Add to Playlist”.
You can also get the sidebar back, if you want to: View -> Show sidebar.
ETA:
There’s no reason you shouldn’t be able to run any version of iTunes you like for as long as you want. Should you get a new iPod or iOS device update, though, it might not play well with older versions.
I use iTunes primarily to load podcasts onto my iPod, and iTunes 11 has one relatively minor, but irritating, change from previous versions that I haven’t found a solution for.
In previous versions, when I’d refresh the list of subscribed podcasts it would show me the new podcasts available for download, but they’d be unchecked and greyed out (which is what I’d prefer, so I can easily distinguish the podcasts I’ve already downloaded and want to sync from the ones I haven’t downloaded yet). In iTunes 11, when I refresh the list all the new (undownloaded) podcasts are checked by default. It’s visually confusing, and doesn’t make logical sense because the check/uncheck is supposed to indicate which items you want to sync, and of course you can’t sync what you haven’t downloaded. It would be like the Music page showing a bunch of songs you don’t even own with the “include in sync” check box selected.
I know, First World Problems. But if anyone knows what I’m talking about and knows a fix, I’d appreciate it. As a workaround I’ve just been selecting all the new/undownloaded podcasts and clicking “uncheck selection,” after each refresh of the list.
(Note that I’m not talking about the “download new podcasts automatically” thing, which I do have disabled - just talking about the list itself.)
still, people continue to comment on how the program looks. which i find flabbergasting. the changes in how the program APPEARS are very small. sure, whether they’re on left or right, top or bottom (and whether the program hides or displays a given thing by default, requiring you to hide or unhide according to your liking), this kind of thing may be different, but they’re not utilizing new graphic elements or a new style or design. it’s still the same old clean, uncluttered white and grey, and the majority of the screen is occupied by a list of items where alternate lines are white and grey. there’s just nothing to talk about here. if you think this is worth discussing, you haven’t really tried USING the program yet, or at least not in very many ways. because the major changes are under the hood. they’re changes to the program’s very function. and they’ve really screwed that up. if it functioned properly, THEN we could talk about whether the interface is optimally laid out to perform those functions. but currently many of you seem to be arguing about the appropriate color lipstick to apply to a pig.
but if the thing most people want to talk about is whether a button is top right or bottom right, and whether a side bar is hidden or displayed by default, then it makes total sense that apple would fail to take into account WHAT THE PROGRAM ACTUALLY DOES: no one notices or cares about that part anyhow! okay, sure, i’m exaggerating, but come on, folks. i expect more substance out of Straight Dope message board users. really.
one thing no one’s mentioned yet, including myself, is that the very clamped-down, un-cooperative way of using itunes 11 with an ipod is just more of their nail-biting freaking out about (1) possible copyright infringement and (2) possible loss of market share on digital audio sales. i’ve got 100+ mp3s that are rightfully mine, but which are apparently too primitive of files b/c itunes isn’t the program that ripped them. itunes will play them, but it will not allow me to put them onto my ipod. it was already a bit ridiculous that somewhere along the way they made it near impossible to pull files OFF the ipod using a file manager (b/c itunes never let you do that). but now they’re making it near impossible to put perfectly legitimate files onto my ipod via itunes. i repeat, these aren’t pirated, stolen, or lifted in any way. they’re perfectly legal. but in their (by all measures, failed) efforts to block certain types of activity from happening because it might indicate piracy, they’ve blocked me, a legitimate user, a person who has spent money, repeatedly, on their ipods.
no, i don’t usually buy my songs from itunes. i use the google play music store, where albums are often on mega sale, and where i can store my much larger media collection (including tracks of my own, stuff purchased from amazon, and stuff purchased from itunes), and stream any and all of them through my super high-end home sound system as well as hear a song on a whim on my android phone. i guess that makes me evil in apple’s book, but it just means that i want to listen to my music through the expensive, high-end equipment i already own, instead of through a computer. oh, right! that means i’m not listening to my music through itunes. yes, evil is the word.
folks who say “oh, you’re just whining because things are evolving and changing”? i beg to differ. the ones dragging their heels in a changing media landscape are the ones making these horrible decisions over at apple.
seriously, they shot themselves in the foot when they made it so that itunes-downloaded songs could only be listened to on a limited number of devices (nevermind the fact that consumers replace their devices at increasingly higher rates as devices shrink in physical size and price). that was when people turned around and looked the other way, and many of us have never forgiven them.
Since this thread is back I’m gonna repeat a question that didn’t get answered before:
Are all these mega-changes, for better or worse, in the Mac or PC version, or both? I’m prompted every few days to update iTunes on my PC, and I haven’t because of all these comments about the shitty new version.
I strongly doubt that iTunes would play, but not transfer a perfectly normal MP3 file. The program that was used to rip it should not matter one iota, at least it doesn’t on my iTunes with about 10,000 songs. What’s the bit rate, and how do they differ from your files ripped with iTunes?
As I said a couple of posts back, iTunes has not had any DRM on music for a very, very long time. Please stop complaining about it. It was needed in the early days of the store to get the music companies onboard - if you remember, there was no convenient way to buy music online before iTunes came along.
They’re in both.
You can get iTunes 11 to look almost like iTunes 10, but there’s a couple of major differences:
- Cover Flow is gone
- You can’t resize the cover size in the album view
- Sidebar is gone by default, but you can get it back
However, the new album view is actually kind of cool: when you click on an album, it expands in place to show you all the songs on it, and it analyses the cover art to provide the proper colors for that particular album. See here for an example how it looks. If you don’t like it, don’t upgrade, because getting the old look back is either difficult or impossible, depending on your preferences.
Another cool new feature is the ability to select the song that’s supposed to play “Up Next”, something they should have added 10 years ago, if you ask me.