iTunes playlist - moving songs

[gsusser]

I have a particular playlist with over 400 tracks and I'm constantly adding songs and then wanting to move them to the top of the list. Ever since upgrading to 10.8, moving a song or songs from the bottom of a playlist to the top is excruciatingly slow. Previously, I highlighted the song or songs and dragged it to the top of the playlist screen and it would move quickly to the upper position. Not so any longer. It was never easy finding the "sweet spot" - that is, where to point the songs on top of the list so it would move quickly, but now it seems there is no "sweet spot!" Or is there another way to do this?

I hope I'm explaining this right.

[wessew]

There are a couple of ways. First, right click on the top of your playlist where the row says name, artist, album, etc. Making sure you also check rating, date added, and at least genre. Now you can click on any of these column headings and the playlist will re-organize in either direction. So, if you click on the date added column it will sort from latest to earliest or with another click from earliest to latest. That is probably the easiest way.

The other way is to create a smart playlist which has, as one of its criteria, either unplayed or recently added or both. You can also do this with multiple smart playlists organized by genre. Then when you want to hear something newly added or unplayed, simply go to this playlist.

Hope this helps...

[gsusser]

Not really, but thanks for trying. I want the order of songs to be of my own volition and not follow any rules. I only want the songs I add to the playlist now to be on top. So the first option wouldn't work. Eventually, some of the songs I add I will want to move lower.

A smart playlist wouldn't work either, at least I don't think so. The one you suggested adds every recently added song to the playlist, not something I want.

Thanks though!

[gsusser]

I finally got the motivation and called apple about this. It's a bug that started with the last IOS upgrade.

[XSEvents]

As a DJ, I have had the exact same frustration for a long time. I dump a new song into a playlist for a gig, or I'm using an existing playlist and want to move a song to the top.

Here's the trick:

Put your playlist in descending order. (click above the numbers on the top left so the arrow is pointing down).

Then search/select the song you want and drag it to the top above the playlist until you see the plus sign. It goes into the #1 slot automatically.

[Jaypatelius]

Gsusser - i feel your pain man - I am so frustrated by this and have been for years. I cant believe there is no simple solution. I complained to Apple to and asked for a right click "add to top" option, which should have been added years ago or a preference to always add new dragged tracks to TOP of a playlist, which makes way more sense.

In the meantime what i do is extend the playlist window top to bottom as much as I can and move the bottom trak to top of whats displayed on screen, then rescroll to make room higher and redrag to top of what is on screen. This works faster than finding sweet top left spot on bigger playlists. Other option when trying to find sweet spot is to kinda slowly move slightly up and down near expected sweet spot until u hit it and then slightly drag up faster. Hopefully that made sense! Good luck

[gsusser]

Jay, I had to laugh because I was doing exactly like you did. That is, moving the track to the top of the screen and then re-scrolling. Having an option to move to the top of the list is a great idea too.

Having said that, the upgrade to the new release, 11.01, fixes the problem! It's even faster now then version 10. At least this is the case with the Mac version.

Not to digress, but it seems odd how Apple works. The techs I spoke with in the past stated they had no documented complaints about this problem.

Also, version 11.0 created an unbelievable nightmare for me. The search function barely worked. There was up to a 5 minute delay in searching (if the program didn't freeze). I spent almost a month working with a senior tech who went as far as he could with the problem. The next step was to record the issue and send it to the engineers. Now, my library is a bit unusual in that it is about 750GB and consists of 85,000 songs. So, I assumed that it was "punishment" for having such a large library. -) But again, there were no "documented" complaints about this problem. HOWEVER, 11.01 fixed the problem while I was waiting for the engineer report.

I wonder then, if there were no documented complaints about these issues, how did they miraculously get fixed?

[wmarti]

Originally Posted by gsusser

Jay, I had to laugh because I was doing exactly like you did. That is, moving the track to the top of the screen and then re-scrolling. Having an option to move to the top of the list is a great idea too.

Having said that, the upgrade to the new release, 11.01, fixes the problem! It's even faster now then version 10. At least this is the case with the Mac version.

Not to digress, but it seems odd how Apple works. The techs I spoke with in the past stated they had no documented complaints about this problem.

Also, version 11.0 created an unbelievable nightmare for me. The search function barely worked. There was up to a 5 minute delay in searching (if the program didn't freeze). I spent almost a month working with a senior tech who went as far as he could with the problem. The next step was to record the issue and send it to the engineers. Now, my library is a bit unusual in that it is about 750GB and consists of 85,000 songs. So, I assumed that it was "punishment" for having such a large library. -) But again, there were no "documented" complaints about this problem. HOWEVER, 11.01 fixed the problem while I was waiting for the engineer report.

I wonder then, if there were no documented complaints about these issues, how did they miraculously get fixed?

Huh? 11.01 fixed the problem? I don't see it. I just (mistakenly, I'm afraid) upgraded to Ver.11 and cannot, for the life of me, rearrange the order of the tunes in a playlist. With the old 10.7 it was just drag and drop, to anywhere I wanted to place it. I even tried to delete a song, then put it back, hoping it would go to the bottom of the list. Guess what, it went right back into the original spot. Wha...? Suggestions?

[Chuckstones]

Errrr ! Excuse me if I'm missing something here.
But I have just been modifying a couple of playlists. And have found I can rearrange the order by simply dragging and dropping anywhere in the list!

Never actually done it before as I'm fairly new to itunes. But found it extremely easy!!

Latest version of itunes as well!

[Jessica Lares]

Originally Posted by Chuckstones

Errrr ! Excuse me if I'm missing something here.
But I have just been modifying a couple of playlists. And have found I can rearrange the order by simply dragging and dropping anywhere in the list!

Never actually done it before as I'm fairly new to itunes. But found it extremely easy!!

Latest version of itunes as well!

That doesn't work very well with very, very, very, very long lists like some of us here have.

It would be nice if we could do page up/top of page like in Safari.

[gsusser]

Originally Posted by wmarti

Huh? 11.01 fixed the problem? I don't see it. I just (mistakenly, I'm afraid) upgraded to Ver.11 and cannot, for the life of me, rearrange the order of the tunes in a playlist. With the old 10.7 it was just drag and drop, to anywhere I wanted to place it. I even tried to delete a song, then put it back, hoping it would go to the bottom of the list. Guess what, it went right back into the original spot. Wha...? Suggestions?

If you cannot rearrange the order, that's another issue. I've had that issue but it's easily fixed by unchecking or checking some columns. In my playlist, the first column is simply the number of the item in the playlist. The second column is the check mark. My 3rd column is the song name. I'm not quite sure how this works, but in this example, toggling these 3 columns can either freeze the order or unfreeze it. This has been the case from what I can remember with every version of iTunes. I remember the first time it happened it took forever to figure out. In any event, I would toggle or untoggle these columns and/or perhaps other columns you may be using to see if that fixes the problem. I don't believe it has anything to do with the upgrade except that the upgrade install might have changed the column view.

[Chuckstones]

Originally Posted by Jessica Lares

That doesn't work very well with very, very, very, very long lists like some of us here have.

It would be nice if we could do page up/top of page like in Safari.

Oops. My bad!!

I only have 3 playlists with approx 40 songs in each! (At the moment)

[johnny5k]

I have a playlist that I use as a replacement for the stack of CDs I currently have in high rotation, so whenever I get a new album, I want to add it to the top of the playlist. Prior to iTunes 11, I would open the playlist in a separate window, scroll to the top, and then drag the tracks from the main window into the top of the playlist window; but iTunes 11 got rid of the option to open playlists in their own window (WHY?!?!) so now I'm back to adding songs to the bottom, and then painfully scrolling them to the top, trying to hit that 'sweet spot' where it scrolls the fastest, but it's tedious, slow and annoying. Clearly this is not ideal, as the playlist has over 1000 tracks and takes almost a minute, each time I want to do it.

I really don't understand the new "Add To..." button either, which I guess replaced the option to open a separate window. I get it, it's more iOS like, where you only have 1 window and so the current one needs to slide trays open/closed; but this isn't iOS, and I CAN have multiple windows open, and disabling desktop features to make it more iOS-like just doesn't make sense!

[MeFromHere]

Originally Posted by gsusser

...
I wonder then, if there were no documented complaints about these issues, how did they miraculously get fixed?

Very few users take the time to report tricky problems like these with enough detail to help anyone fix them. So the database that your phone support person can access might not have had this problem, or it might have had the problem with such a vague description that he missed it.

Most software vendors have an "internal" bug database, which has only problems found by internal testing (these aren't usually shared with the public) and those that came from customers that were eventually elevated all the way to the engineering team. This database is NEVER empty; they always release software with known bugs that they believe (or hope) won't bother many users. It's quite possible that the engineers knew about your bug because it was found by internal testing, and the fix has been in the pipeline for a while. The phone support people probably don't have access all this internal data.