There are lots of things I don't care for in iTunes 11, but the big one for me is losing the ability to see a shuffled playlist's play sequence update in the main window. That's HUGE for me.
Before iTunes 11, you could bring a playlist into the main window and see its then current play order, then double-click any track to start playing, then hold down the option key and press the shuffle button iteratively until you saw a sequence you liked.
The display in the main panel would show the currently playing track at the top of the list and then the reshuffled remainder below it.
When you got what you liked, you could control-click on the playlist in the source menu and get the contextual menu and pick "Copy to play order" to preserve the shuffled order, and then unclick the shuffle button et voila, the list would stay in that last-shuffled order. You could sync lists to mobile devices pre-shuffled and not ever have to turn shuffle on/off on the mobiles. You could glance at a partly played shuffled playlist in non-shuffle mode in iTunes on a desktop/laptop and see where to resume playing it through without omission or duplication, by just glancing at where the last-play date sequence broke.
It was wonderful. It did not need fixing. It got fixed and is now totally nuts. I have experimented on some little playlists holding three or four tracks each from three or four artists, lists that had been shuffled and saved in previous iTunes versions. Now no matter what I do do them, they show up on my laptop iTunes main window in that same sequence, even if I save a newly shuffled order (which I can see in Up Next, which I loathe). Great, so I get a visual representation of how the list wil NOT play. Very useful indeed.
So I should have to look in UpNext to see how a playlist will really play? And the main window is what, chopped liver?
So Copy to Play Order still works, but the main window display is forever "what you see is what you brought sometime in the past" ??
When did Apple decide that what you see bears no necessary resemblance to what you get?
Here's my question: How can I see, in the main window, what I will get when I save a shuffled playlist's play order in iTunes 11 and then refetch it into that main window? If I can't ever see the sequence except by looking in that infernal Up Next, then how can I get my old version of iTunes back without destroying my libraries, messing up my devices, losing my Apple ID or iCloud ID or having to restore my darn laptop from scratch?!
If they don't roll this particular change back, I think it will mean Apple really does intend to do away with the main window next, as part of the dumbing down of an OS to iOS. Too bad. That means we're raising nextgens too dumb to handle an OS. Eventually that will sort itself out in an interesting way, won't it. No need for opposable thumbs, etc., reverse evolution to black hole status. Possibly a universal record for fastest round trip.
Maybe I have to look around at alternative music massagers. Suggestions, please.
