Help me solve this annoying thing

mine doesnt do that, are you using Version 7?
(im using XP SP2 though ---may have nothing to do with it)

You know, I was just wondering the same thing....

Moving to iPod and iTunes forum.

Mine on OS X does not do that - you have to select "show current song" for it to go back to the currently playing song.

This may not solve your problem, but I have found that having a "Now Playing" playlist is a great idea. It is the one feature that I really liked from using Windows Media Player (and it is automatically created in WMP). What I've found good about this is that you can add songs or albums to this playlist while you're browsing the rest of your library. I use to find that if I was just playing an album directly in my library, it would stop playing at the end of each song (though I may be remembering this incorrectly -- it might have merely been at the end of each album) if I browsed to a different place in my library. Not to mention that there was no easy way to determine what would play next.

I think that the idea of a dedicated "Now Playing" playlist would be a great addition to iTunes. If you've never used it in WMP, it works as follows: if you double-click on a song (or an album or an artist) in your library, that song (or all songs contained in that album or artist grouping) is automatically added to the "Now Playing" playlist. If there were any songs in this playlist from the previous time it was used, then the old songs are removed. To add more tunes to the "Now Playing" playlist, you just drag and drop (or use the context sensative menu, or the top menu, and select "add to Now Playing playlist"). It's not much harder to simulate this using iTunes now, but it would save a few steps to have it automated, and it's damned usefull!

Um? Mine switches back to "now playing" but when I hit menu it's back to the list I was looking at.

You can pretty much do this with Party Shuffle. Right-click tracks in your Library and select "Add to Party Shuffle" or "Play Next in Party Shuffle".

Well, sort of. The problem with the party shuffle is that if you don't manually choose songs for it, it will continue to choose random songs from whatever playlist you have selected. I quite often will construct a playlist on-the-fly at night, when I'm heading to bed. I want to start the playlist immediately, choose whatever songs I want to add to it, and then have the music stop when the tunes I've selected have played. I can do this by using my so-called "Now Playing" list. If I want the music to continue all night without worrying about stopping (perhaps when I have people over), then the party-shuffle is indeed a good way to go -- and I do use it often -- but again, it's not exactly what I would want it to be.

I am on MacOS X 10.4.8 on a MacBook and the latest version of iTunes and I have the same problem. So it is not limited to Windows

Cheers

Do you have the "Browser" enabled? (Edit -> Show Browser) It allows you to browse by Artist and Album (and Genre, if you have that enabled in Edit -> Preferences -> General), rather than simply scrolling up and down a list of hundreds or thousands of tracks (if I'm correct, you don't have the browser enabled). Note, I'm using iTunes 6, not iTunes 7, so I don't have either of the two new methods of browsing one's library (cover flow, I think, is one of these).

If you have the browsing view enabled on the classic library view (if you are using iTunes 7, I believe that it is the left-most of the three "View" buttons in the upper-right, beside the "Search" area), then do the following: you are, for instance, browsing to Radiohead -> Amnesiac while you are playing "Patriarch on a Vespa" in the Metric -> Live It Out folder, then when this song ends, the view will not jump back to the Metric -> Live it Out folder, but the music will simply end (as if you've come to the end of a playlist). To start another track, you will have to manually start a new song. This is the behaviour that I found annoying and that made me suggest that you use my so-called "Now Playing" playlist.

Note that in order to use the "Browsing" to its full strength, you will want to make sure that your meta-data is good -- at the very least, have Artist and Album info filled in for all of your music, and you will likely want to have "part of a compilation" (in the "Get Info" area -- Ctrl-I in Win, Command-I in OSX) for any appropriate CDs (like soundtracks, mixes, etc, that may have a bunch of different Artists, but are all really on the same CD), which will keep all of these songs in the Artist = Compilations group.