iTunes 11, good or bad?

[BRLawyer]

Originally Posted by urkel

But it was broke. The problem is that they didn't "fix" the things people had problems with and removed the parts that some people liked.

Tell me where it was broke, please.

iTunes performs flawlessly here, with no lags, giving me ALL information I want on songs, videos and books, and letting me sort them the way I deem appropriate. I've never had such a tightly-indexed collection of music like now...NEVER.

Now why do we need iTunes 11 again? To make it look like the terrible iPad app? No, thanks.

[d0nK]

Originally Posted by Lvivske

what are you talking about? i can edit the columns (in song view), i never get a warning message (just tested), and next track is still there (in albums and songs view, not artist for some reason)

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dude, what?

Image

some people need to sit down and take a deep breath before voicing their complaints

Oh please

That tiny View Options list of 4 attributes to order by does not cut it!
You can't order by Date Added and all the other available columns that you see in Songs View.

iTunes 11 is ridiculously frustrating. Sure if you don't have many tunes it probably seems fine. I have loads of tunes ripped from my massive vinyl collection that do not exist in the iTunes Store. I like to be able to sort how I want.

Apple's dumbing down of technology continues.

[BlackMangoTree]

You still can't have multiple genres, artists or composers for individual tracks or albums. PATHETIC!!!!

[Crady]

I'm running iTunes under Windows and have multiple "i" devices -- each with its own ".itl" library file. Prior to iTunes 11, when I loaded a particular library file its filename was displayed prominently atop the iTunes window. A quick glance at the window would tell me what library was currently loaded.

Unless I've missed something in Preferences or View this feature seems to be absent in iTunes 11, making it impossible to tell what library file has loaded.

Anyone know how to restore this feature or do I need to downgrade to 10.7 to get it back?

Thanks!

[kirky29]

Originally Posted by Eithanius

Apple please bring back individual Shuffle/Repeat functions on individual playlists/albums...

You scared the life out of me then! One of my many (and biggest) complaints about Spotify is that you can't repeat a single song.

Annoyingly iTunes has removed the icon, but it's in the control menu!

[Eithanius]

Originally Posted by kirky29

You scared the life out of me then! One of my many (and biggest) complaints about Spotify is that you can't repeat a single song.

Annoyingly iTunes has removed the icon, but it's in the control menu!

Unfortunately that's not what I meant...

[BigBadDavid]

Apple have removed "Display Duplicates". Whilst it wasn't the best tool, it did serve a useful purpose, so I can't believe they've removed it.

Because of this, I am regretting updating...

[mic j]

Just noticed that, when playing a radio station, when the main window is minimized to the mini player, the miniplayer displays what is playing but does not update after that. Nor does it display the radio station. Nor does it scroll song titles too long for the window. Obviously buggy stuff. So far, I like the What's Next addition but not much else about iTunes 11.

[dwkellyiii]

I can't stand the new iTunes.

I have a library larger than 100k songs and it is the most sluggish program around. 10.7 was handled it better (not much better but still better)

This combined with the removal of the display duplicates feature has turned me away.

Also, I am running Mountain Lion with 8GB ram and a 3.2 ghz i7 processor so it should be able to run no sweat.

[Shaun, UK]

What's going on with iTunes 11? Since I upgraded on Friday I've had one problem after the next. The whole thing is totally confusing now whereas it was quite simple and intuitive with iTunes 10. Deleted artwork, some films won't play, it completely messed up my TV Shows library, it's still very slow and laggy to respond, I can't find half the things I used to use. It would be fair to say that after just a few days I'm already hacked off with it and with Apple for shipping this pile of crap.

[throAU]

Fast.

The UI makes more sense.

I can easily queue music without needing to create a playlist (which was totally crap on the previous versions - something I was able to do in winamp easily in like, 1997).

I like.

[paulsalter]

Thinking of looking for a new media player now

This one looks much prettier now, but has too many missing/restrictive features now it's a pain in the **** to use

doesn't inspire me to listen to my music

[Dataz]

I love it, except for the search issues with compilation albums.

[playsontheleft]

At first I was thrown off a bit. I thought the whole thing kinda looked messy and there were way too many ways to display and search your music and I couldn't get it back to how I liked it before.

5 minutes later, I was in love with it. The layout is actually not that much different in terms of functionality and I find it really ascetically pleasing. The Mini Player is exceptional - if they add a hotkey to search in it (or do they have one now?) I'll use it over CoverSutra. And Up Next is just... wow. I don't think I've been so excited about a new feature in Apple software. It's long overdue, definitely, yet I wouldn't have thought of it before A really cool addition to iTunes. Great job on this one imo.

[iMechanic]

Hi there,

I was so familiar to my iTunes, and now with iTunes 11, everything is gone

I want two things back:

Cover flow (I chose to use the top half of my music list as cover flow, the bottom end showed all my songs sorted by download date)

At the bottom of the list, it showed how many songs I had. I want that back...

[playsontheleft]

Originally Posted by iMechanic

At the bottom of the list, it showed how many songs I had. I want that back...

Cover Flow is gone, but go to View > Show Status Bar to get the song count back.

[DP812]

For the most part, I like it, but there are some things that have me scratching my head.

Whenever I'm in one of my movie playlists, I can change the order in list mode, but once I switch to a grid view, iTunes just completely ignores the view options I select and arranges the movies randomly.

For some strange reason, if I click on a movie title when it's in a playlist, it displays no information. I kept thinking my metadata had screwed up, but when I went to the regular library view and clicked on that same title, the information was all there.

I like that the sidebar can be turned off, and that you can drag titles from the window to the right and then a sidebar will appear where you can drop it into playlists or devices. But is there a way to access playlists without turning on the sidebar?

Grouping TV shows under one listing is great and was a necessary fix. But it seems like there's no longer any point to having multiple artwork for different seasons. When you open a TV show and click on a different season, I think the artwork for that season should be displayed. And grouping multiple seasons under one show is still needed for the Apple TV.

Can't seem to change the artwork size, except for music and even then, it's only in genre or artist view. On my MacBook Air, this isn't a problem, but it could be really frustrating for people with larger screens.

The absence of cover flow is also disappointing. I wish that feature was on the Apple TV and I would use it to quickly scan through movies when I wasn't sure what to watch.

[malnar]

It's pretty, I'll give Apple that. But I think it's sloppy. I shiver thinking of what we could have gotten in October that they pulled the plug on and made us wait until last week for this. You can't select-all songs in this view and that view, but you can in this one. You can't see how many songs/GBs are in a playlist in this or that view but can in this one. You can't delete an album from a playlist by right-clicking, have to select all songs in that album and delete. This is just off the top of my head, things that popped up in the past hour. There are a bunch of other annoyances that appeared in the past 5 days, too, but they've been covered by many others.

My biggest complaint, however, is that they provided absolutely no way to control iTunes Match - no re-match, no un-match, no artwork correction, nothing. For this, I'm unsubscribing. I have a LOT of music that has been incorrectly matched and matched without artwork despite meticulous metadata (handled outside of iTunes by kid3). I'm done with Match. It was handy but I'm sick of too many things.

To me, this is a severely dumbed-down iTunes. It's built for people who like single-songs and have a small library, not people have a large library and love albums. It's extremely unwieldy for dealing with large amounts of music.

[dkersten]

I personally love the new iTunes. On my MacBook Air (where I keep all my music) I haven't taken it off the mini player. I love that I can see which tracks are up next and if I don't want to listen to it I can easily skip it. I also love the new iCloud features. I have 3 computers; my Air, my Pro, and a Windows desktop. Transferring content was always a pain between the 3. Now I have all my music on my Air, most of my movies and TV shows on my Pro, and all my content on my Windows desktop in a central location (and because I have my HDDs in RAID 1 so its backed up).

Plus its very smooth and pleasant to use, even on Windows gasp!

[RSL]

It's soooo ugly. The silver reminds me of some old windows program. I'm staying on 10.7.

[Fresh Tendrils]

Originally Posted by paulsalter

Thinking of looking for a new media player now

This one looks much prettier now, but has too many missing/restrictive features now it's a pain in the **** to use

doesn't inspire me to listen to my music

Unfortunately, I don't think there is a viable alternative. VLC is good, but it's not a media organiser. XBMC and Plex are good, but their interfaces are really meant for home theatre's and not for when your just working at your computer. And last time I used Songbird most of the skins etc were incompatible with the current version.

I'm glad that I only updated my secondary computer [which has a small media collection], and not my main one which has everything. Admittedly there are 1 or 2 nice new features in itunes 11 [expanded album view, turn off side bar], but in return they took away most of the customisable options, group albums option, removed the dark grid view option, show art in song view, column browser on left, made search worse, surprisingly made it slower and removed features like display duplicates. I understand that they want to make it easier for casual users, but why remove a basic feature like display duplicates?

Hopefully they put some of these options back, but considering it took them so long to put colour back in the sidebar, I doubt it.

[paulsalter]

Originally Posted by Fresh Tendrils

Unfortunately, I don't think there is a viable alternative. VLC is good, but it's not a media organiser. XBMC and Plex are good, but their interfaces are really meant for home theatre's and not for when your just working at your computer. And last time I used Songbird most of the skins etc were incompatible with the current version.

I'm glad that I only updated my secondary computer [which has a small media collection], and not my main one which has everything. Admittedly there are 1 or 2 nice new features in itunes 11 [expanded album view, turn off side bar], but in return they took away most of the customisable options, group albums option, removed the dark grid view option, show art in song view, column browser on left, made search worse, surprisingly made it slower and removed features like display duplicates. I understand that they want to make it easier for casual users, but why remove a basic feature like display duplicates?

Hopefully they put some of these options back, but considering it took them so long to put colour back in the sidebar, I doubt it.

Thanks for the options will check these out, I do have plex installed as I use this to stream my movies

The desktop client is, well, a bit old fashioned looking and clunky

I am hoping for an update to add missing features, as a media organizer I still think iTunes is the best, but as a media player it sucks now

[decafjava]

Originally Posted by adder7712

It runs well on Windows, surprising to be honest.

Yes same here, love it!!!

[Shaun, UK]

Originally Posted by DP812

Can't seem to change the artwork size, except for music and even then, it's only in genre or artist view. On my MacBook Air, this isn't a problem, but it could be really frustrating for people with larger screens.

That was something I used all the time. I would re-seize the artwork to the minimum size so I didn't have to scroll down so much. I can't think of any logical reason why they would remove this feature. It's the little annoyances like this that make me wish I'd stuck with iTunes 10.

[urkel]

Originally Posted by BRLawyer

Tell me where it was broke, please.

iTunes performs flawlessly here, with no lags, giving me ALL information I want on songs, videos and books, and letting me sort them the way I deem appropriate. I've never had such a tightly-indexed collection of music like now...NEVER.

Just because it performs flawlessly for you doesnt mean it does the same for everyone else. I guess you live in a bubble if you think that the world unanimously feels iTunes is "flawless" and has no room for improvement but for the last decade then a steady pattern of complaints have come around so it's not hard to see where the software was improved and where it remained the same:

Fixed:
Speed: iTunes is a bloated mess that has been overrun by features which resulted in a sluggish experience for many users. [iTunes 11 drastically improved the speed]

Photo sync through iPhoto/Aperture: Larger libraries often had issues with new folders appearing in the sync list, duplications or wasted data space due to poor thumbnail management. So far this area seems much better but that may be due to the latest Aperture update.

Windows Version: iTunes 10 was Garbage. Surprisingly, iTunes 11's performance improvements are most noticeable on my 10yr old Windows machine that I use as an iTunes server for my 2 AppleTV's.

Not Fixed
App Store: The app store is (still) a joke. Its slow and cumbersome and by having an iTunes ONLY interface then often times its incredibly inconvenient. [iTunes 11

iOS Product Sync: Many people report issues with wifi sync where files simply dont get transferred/updated or products drop off the devices list. Ive got 4 iOS products that randomly are able to connect so I still rely on wires in order to get a connection

File Location Awareness: The inability for a modern application to not automatically know when a file gets added, renamed or deleted is ridiculous. For example, my iOS Applications folder contains 718 items but my iTunes Apps only list 600. So there's 100+ duplicates taking space on my SSD which requires me to manually find each duplicate and delete it. Folders should be monitored by the software, not given a grey exclamation point when a file(s) is missing. (And the "search for all missing files" option rarely works).

File Management: Apple removed "Display Duplicates" which is frustrating because of how much manual file management is required. Also, Apple actually gave us a "Home Movie" category which is amazing. But they failed to give a Home Movie category in the sidebar which means files are still mixed.

iTunes Match: No OPTIONS for updating metadata with iTunes version, random file duplication (both server side and locally), no re-matching of songs that are clearly the iTunes database. I paid for year2 of iTunes Match but its incredibly disappointing when Apple ignores a product once the hype wears down. Match needs a big update, especially since its a pay service.

iTunes Server: This is more of a gripe that is felt most by AppleTV users, but iTunes should be a standalone file server built into their Airplay products. Plug in a hard drive into an Airport Extreme/Time Capsule and allow that to serve media to the aTV. But as it is now then I require a computer on 24/7 just to transmit local media to a device 2ft away from it. (Yes, the cloud is a solution when dealing with 6MB music files but when dealing with 6GB HD movies then its incredibly inconvenient)

Originally Posted by BRLawyer

Now why do we need iTunes 11 again? To make it look like the terrible iPad app? No, thanks.

We need iTunes 11 because the old version was aging poorly and updates are good when they address important issues. Unfortunately this is not the "major overhaul" we were expecting since most of the issues people had were not addressed and some features people like were removed. Its a decent update, but its just not the kind of Apple stuff that Apple should be proud to brag about.