First look: Apple's overhauled iTunes 11 - Page 3

I think it looks cheap... I cannot minimize the window by double-clicking its title bar (or what's left of it), is somebody else having this problem? i find it really useful on all other applications...

Shuffle and repeat are now all or nothing - meaning - if you shuffle a playlist and then click to play a different playlist, or even play a song in the main library song list, iTunes is still set to shuffle.

 

Previously, iTunes remembered which playlists you had set to shuffle (or repeat).  Now, no.

 

Wow.  So many bugs.  Or are these simply poor design choices?  Actually, I'm guessing these are intentionally poor design choices Apple made in order to dumb down iTunes.

I hated the new mini player the very moment I opened it first time.

I hate iTunes 11! I have a library of 30,000 songs and used cloverlfow as my default view. Now it's way to tedious and complicated to do the things I was before under the current set up. I'm going to try to uninstall. I already complained to apple. Hopefully they will add cover flow in a update in the immediate future. ...This sucks. I can't deny it anymore. Apple is falling off without Jobs.

Thank you.  Holy cow am I glad to shut that popup off.

 

You're being a bit of a drama queen. Coverflow was just a horizontal scrolling selection for albums. Does the forced switch to vertical scrolling throw your world out of kilter?

Some of the posts in here are a bit amusing. At least they got it in before the Mayan calendar ends ;)

Yes I did! When I click on it, it shows the songs but it doesn't start playing like it was in the previous iTunes

The problem with the new search is that it no longer updates the results while you type. You have to pause typing for a short moment before it updates the results. Very lame. The coolest feature of iTunes taken away.

 

(To me the main thing about iTunes was that was a very effective and quick database. Look for anything, type a few characters and boom the result are there.)

How the hell does one display the track play time in the Mini Player? I can't find an option to display it.

The new Mini Player is revolting.

The CMD-J options pop up menu has changed as well

Tickled but concerned, my music expenditure just shot up at least 150%, an easy facilty is made of purchasing with having the integrated iTunes Store which has improved phenomenally. Already I've made note of purchases from tracks I had previous revisited to see if recommendations had changed. There is more, and more frequently appropriate in content. Is that the D16 erroneously displayed at times? Some company? Regardless, I think what beastly characteristics have been addressed, as always there's something we'll find omitted but.... those around long enough know enough when to shrug those things off. PS- Apologies getting addicted to dictation

It's much different. And if you don't know that, learn about it before you post.

Overall performance is pretty nice so far.  I've tried a five year old MacBook Pro running ML, a one week old HP laptop running Windows 8, an 18 month old Toshiba laptop running Windows 7 Pro and lastly, my home server which is an ancient Dell Poweredge 2800 running Windows Server 2008 R2.  Despite running Xeons, the Dell is not really faster compared to modern machines (even laptops).  But my 21,000 song library, movie and TV library is all on it.  So far, performance is pretty nice and one thing I've noticed is that no longer do I have to do without artwork in any mode while sharing the main library from the Dell.  It used to be that artwork never was rendered in older iTunes and only recently did you get some artwork in some modes in recent releases.  Now you get full artwork in all modes which means it's doing a better job caching and managing all of this.

 

On the downside, it seems like the ability to resize artwork is gone.  So you cannot control how many albums or movies you see in a screen.  Not sure why that was taken away.

 

Interestingly enough, they broke their own HIG for the last series of UI changes in iTunes.

and you usually do ...

I always liked the little bouncing bars view you could toggle into.  Looks like they're gone.

that would be the equalizer ... and although that is still there (under the Window menu) i can't see where to enable the visuals.

 

 

You don't understand the purpose of the maximize button. The full screen button makes the app take up the whole screen. The maximize button drops the window down to the edge of the dock and widens the window in proportion to how much it dropped the windows down. 

I have a macbook pro 2012 and installed the new iTunes. The one problem I have is when I update iTunes match my whole computer freezes until it is finished. Besides that it seems to be much faster. 

 

Visuals are under the View menu.

I can get used to whatever the layout is.  My big question is: does the new version keep all of the playlists from the previous version??  If I have to recreate all of my damn playlists...I will go medieval on Apple's behind.

 

I use playlists extensively and they all moved over intact. There are also scripts you can use to back them up (including Smart Lists). A good idea if you have a ton like I do.

That's not true.

If you start dragging a TV Show or an Album or a Movie, or an iTunesU class etc... the Playlists show up on the right.

I recommend watching the following demo:  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c3k_11Lx7Gw

Why would I want to start dragging a file just to see a playlist? It also only shows the devices and the 'purchased' playlist and any static lists,. The feature you describe is useful for moving or adding a file to a device or static list, but doing that to simply access your playlists makes no sense. The issue isn't about moving or adding a media file to a device. It's the fact that the playlist button only shows up under Music, rather than under movies, podcasts, music videos, etc. You can access all of them from Music though, which isn't intuative.

Edited by DJRumpy - 11/29/12 at 8:46pm

By the way, for those nervous about losing any playlists, you can export them beforehand, including the criteria for Smart Playlists (a feature that iTunes lacks for some reason).

http://dougscripts.com/itunes/scripts/ss.php?sp=exportsmartcriteria

 

Just download and put this apple script in your ~/Library/iTunes/Scripts folder. It will let you do 'Selected' playlists, or 'All'. Very handy.

Heh. Looks like you can now export Smart List criteria in iTunes 11. That's excellent, although it appears you would have to do each on individually (the script above will export all of them in one shot...handy for a full backup). Just make sure you export it using the XML format (the default is TXT).

 

And presumably still display all playlists because trying to display only media-specific playlists could be confused by mixed media playlists and nested playlist folders.

 

 

It's Home Video(s).   Thanks for the tip.

 

I discovered the Command-<#> shortcut switches between the major library categories.  Anyone know of shortcuts for navigating between top row buttons?  And I still haven't figured out what the cloud icon next to the category menu signifies.

The cloud button just indicates when you have downloads available in the cloud for the selected library category. For example, any past purchases, digital downloads, etc. I elected to just turn them off in the preferences, but you can also turn them off via specific file selection, or just for a specific category (Movies, Music, etc).

I think Apple could do the context sensitive playlists properly. If a playlist displays a specific type of media, show it in that media category. Seemingly simple enough. I already sent in a suggestion. Say for example you have a playlist that shows Podcasts and Music. Then that playlist would show in both Podcasts and the Music category. They already do something similar with Apple TV (TV Show playlists won't show in the Movies section but they will show in the TV section and vice versa).

Coverflow goodbye. It was more eyecandy than useful really, so not missing it here.

 

Got it - thanks.  Disabling it under Preferences makes it go away.  I was confused with it still displayed even after selecting every individual "Hide <category> in the Cloud" option.

 

 

Good example.  Having only recently started playing with Apple TV, I noticed how it filters out any TV Shows in a mixed Movies+TV Shows playlist that it displays under the Movies section and any Movies from that same playlist when its displayed under the TV Shows sections.  I can imagine it working like that in iTunes while also handling nested playlists similarly to Apple TV.

1st bug I've just noticed is that Plays and Last Played will not update if Crossfade is selected.

Definitely no improvement when synching to iPhone and iPad,
still a messy "Books"-section and
double-clicking on the books don't open on my iMac since there is no iBook for OS/X

I'm still trying to get used to it (Podcast listing fonts got too big and my list got unmanageable). For me it's just a cosmetic change without the media hub functions I expected.

The artist photo 'Gallery' seems rather slow, unfinished and buggy.  I clicked on a photo and just got a grey box, nothing else.  Second time I got a black box with the image but no controls.  Third time I got the controls too.  You can resize the image window but the photo doesn't resize.  Totally lacks the Apple polish.

 

Also, on 'normal' non-retina screens the artist's Store view cuts off the 'Recommended' list and you can't scroll right to view it.  

 

Apart from these niggles which I'm sure they'll fix soon, very pleased with the update. 

 

Can't agree more. Really like the option to read books on my Mac and iBooks still lacks that after all this time :\

It appears that they tried to combine the syncing activity into a single info pane with scroll bars. An odd choice, but at least you can still click on a specific device to see any sync activity for that specific device. I didn't notice any particular speed improvements there. I did a test sync of about 32 GB of data and 16 GB of data and saw only 1-3 MB/s according to my network activity.

I think I could learn to like the interface given time. I've turned the sidebar back off and just started using 'Music' to manage my playlists. I do like that it removes all of the clutter from the left pane even if it is 'music' centric, it works.

 

FYI, for those who are curious, you can turn off the color preference changes in the General options ("Use custom colors for open albums, movies, etc."), as well as disable all iCloud downloads, which I found distracting after removing some I didn't want and still having them show up in the list. You can disable all iCloud options in the preferences on the Store tab ("Show iTunes in the Cloud purchases"), or just use the View option to disable iCloud downloads for a specific Library view:

    View - > Show/Hide {Mediatype} in iCloud

Edit: You can also just delete an iCloud download by selecting the item, and holding down Alt + Delete and selecting the option to delete the iCloud download if you just don't want or need that download to show up anywhere. Just remember this will probably remove it from all devices.

Hope that helps.

Edited by DJRumpy - 11/30/12 at 4:03am

 

It's now called "Up Next".

I know I initially criticised iTunes 11 for being blurry, but after just a few hours use I have warmed to it.

 

While I still maintain that the use of Helvetica makes the text look less sharp and slightly bulkier, it's just something that I've already gotten use to (like the new icon).

 

What I do like, however, is the album view. I really like the way iTunes takes the colour scheme of the album artwork, it looks great. I only wish they'd group the album into one, though, rather than separating one album into multiple pieces if there is a different artist. I have over 7 different 'NOW' album lists, yet in reality it's one album.

 

But other than that, I haven't encountered any bugs and it seems to work a lot quicker than before. 

Podcasts don't sync across devices yet. Am I supposed to delete the podcasts in iTunes for them to sync to my iPhone and iPad (which do sync BTW)?

 

You can still see your playlists the old fashion way in the old "Side Bar" view by going to the "View" menu and selecting "Show Side Bar" to see the playlists the old fashion way.

 

This is an awesomely flexible iTunes, Keep playing with it and just grows on you.