Q: I really dislike iTunes 11. How do I revert to an earlier version?

Thanks for expressing my exact feelings about iTunes 11. My blood has been boiling all day trying to rid of thing and go back to the last version. They totally destroyed the mini player. It will not update tunes when listening to radio. Plus, you have to tab through the controls to get to the info. It won't scroll tune names and the window won't open enough to show the full title of many tunes while streaming radio. All and all a huge step backwards for iTunes. Apple's fanatical quest to "simplify" is turning into a nightmare.

Ditto - my roommate got an earful of *** (plus more insults) when I saw the horrible design of the new itunes. 

Edited since I found out I can at least get the fricken sidebar back so It doesn't look like some ******** POS.  I still wish they would get the **** bars across the bottom so that I can actually click on the last piece without having the stupid scroll line in my way.

Message was edited by: Badger3k

Thanks for your opinion on this. I could not state it any better. The idea of my computer being a giant iPad is ludicrous. I also don't understand why the motto at Apple is "if ain't broke, break it". I'm sorry to rant here in this forum but I think the reason they are trying to make their computers look and act like iPads and iPhones is because they sell more of them then they do full on computers now. It's simply about the all mighty dollar!

I tired to delete iTunes 11 and reinstall 10, but got the same error -42408.

I've reinstalled 11 and am going to try and find a 'clean' way to uninstall it and reinstall 10.

What a pain - fair enough if they want to make a huge new change, but it should be easy to go back to an earlier version.  Apple's becoming very 'Microsoft'-ish, particularly with iTunes.
If anyone is able to give clear instructions on a clean way to uninstall iTunes 11 and reinstall 10 (including using Time Machine), it'd be much appreciated.

Holy eff iTunes has been ruined. I think my biggest pet peeve with this is that it seems to default to organizing Albums by Album Artist. I have over 9,000 songs, and usually go through artist, but with albums like "Punk Goes Pop" where the album has multiple artists you can just go to the album and listen to all of them. Now with older iTunes you would get duplicate artist folders on your iPod or iPhone if one of them had like a space after it or something (easy to fix) now to the problem. I recently added the "Punk Goes Pop" albums to my iPhone all 5 albums, organzied them in iTunes, erased every field in the "get info" part of the song except for album name, artist, and song. Ideally, when I went in to my albums tab I'd see "Punk Goes Pop - Vol. 1" "Punk Goes Pop - Vol. 2" etc. then click on them and see all the songs on that album and artists for each song. Nope, what happens is that every single song in every single has its own spot under the album tab, so under albums there are 16 duplicates of "Punk Goes Pop - Vol. 1" because every song has a different artist. ***???? It is like this for every single album, so for 5 albums I have like 72 titles in the album tab!!

go to itunes and select the view account drop down. then deauthorize all computers. then re-authorize. Should be ok.

Holy eff iTunes has been ruined. I think my biggest pet peeve with this is that it seems to default to organizing Albums by Album Artist. I have over 9,000 songs, and usually go through artist, but with albums like "Punk Goes Pop" where the album has multiple artists you can just go to the album and listen to all of them. Now with older iTunes you would get duplicate artist folders on your iPod or iPhone if one of them had like a space after it or something (easy to fix) now to the problem. I recently added the "Punk Goes Pop" albums to my iPhone all 5 albums, organzied them in iTunes, erased every field in the "get info" part of the song except for album name, artist, and song. Ideally, when I went in to my albums tab I'd see "Punk Goes Pop - Vol. 1" "Punk Goes Pop - Vol. 2" etc. then click on them and see all the songs on that album and artists for each song. Nope, what happens is that every single song in every single has its own spot under the album tab, so under albums there are 16 duplicates of "Punk Goes Pop - Vol. 1" because every song has a different artist. ***???? It is like this for every single album, so for 5 albums I have like 72 titles in the album tab!!

**Edit**

Alright, so I went into my settings on my phone and went into music and turned "Group By Album Artist" off, still didn't fix this problem, still had a billion of the same thing. What next?

I then went in and removed all the songs I just added from my phone, went in to iTunes and selected all 5 albums, right clicked, and hit "get info" under the Album Artist section I just put "Various Artists" this changed that field for every song on all 5 albums. After this I put all the songs back on my phone and it was resolved (even with "Group By Album Artist" still off)!!! I HATE the album artist override thing!! So irritating!! Especially when you have as many songs as I do! Hopefully this helps anyone else that may have this same problem!

Also, if you want to get really close to the older version of iTunes without having to go through the whole process of uninstalling and backing up and everything else, I figured out a couple things to do that'll give you essentially the "original" iTunes look with a different skin. First, what you want to do is go to "view" and select "show side bar" this will give you back the bar on the left with all your playlists and devices. Next, go to "view" and select "show status bar" this will put back the bar on the bottom that shows the number of songs, time, size, etc. Then, on the top where it has the different tabs songs, artsits, albums, etc, select the songs tab, and only use this tab. Under those top tabs it will give you the old orginization or sorting columns that the previous versions of iTunes had. Finally, click view again and then select "view options" and that is where you can customize the columns that you want to be able to see and set up the orginization the same way that you had it on your old versions of iTunes. If you only use the "songs" tab at the top then it will essentially be the same as all the other iTunes, just with a different style or theme.

I also noticed that with this iTunes that the "get album artwork" function works MUCH better. In the previous versions I'd select ALL songs and select get album artwork and it wouldn't really find anything. It would show the status at the top; searching 280 of 3230 or whatever, and when it got done I would only notice a couple new albums with artwork. I just did this a minute ago and it found over 1,000 new albums, almost all of them have the picture now. Only 318 of my 2,800 different albums couldn't be found.

Someone earlier also mentioned something about the columns not being big enough because it wasn't full screen or somehting like that, so I thought I'd add that if you put your cursor on the vertical lines you can move it to be bigger or smaller so you can see all of the title. Also, if you have a Mac you can click the arrow's in the top right corner for the full screen.

Your workaround seems good but as I talked about earlier, the mini player is a disaster. If you use the mini player often (which I do) to listen to radio, you will hate it. It no longer scrolls the tune names so long names and arists names only show partially. You cannot see any info in the mini player unless you tab through the controls (everytime you use it). It will not refresh the song names while listening to radio (this may be a bug). The only way to get the current song name is to close the mini player and open it again or go to the full view, making it totally useless for me. All of this is very annoying given that all this worked just fine in the previous version. If anybody had figured out how to get the old features on the new mini player, I implore you to let me know.

I finally managed to get back to the last version and will keep using it until these issues are resolved.

how did you get back to the old version without the -42408 error when you try to authorize to play protected content?

Sadly I wasn't able to get around the 42408 but since I have such disdain for iTunes 11 I'm living with it the way it is (which is better than v.11) and hopefully a solution can be found or some of the issues in version 11 will be resolved.

I rolled back to iTunes 10.7 via a clone backup. It feels like iTunes 12 now!

No disrespect to the iTunes developers- they did some great stuff- but the lack of album art preview in the main window (the pane in the lower left corner) just killed it for me.

1) You can no longer click on a track to check its art.

2) The currently-playing art is now only a tiny thumbnail.

3) Full-size album art is completely inaccessible — except for the currently-playing track.

It's almost my worst-case scenario as a DJ. iTunes 11 removes my ability to check art while browsing playlists, just by clicking- a critical memory aid. (I use iTunes as a browser for Traktor)

Now the question is- will they fix this… If not, how long can I hold out on 10.7? And what do I do after that?

We are vulnerable these days. The music in our life is in some respects a hostage to decisions made far away…

I agree the new mini-player is a huge disaster - and for what?...so it looks "cleaner" on the screen? It's cleaner but tells me absolutely nothing about the status of what I'm listening to. It shows the song track and artist but not the album name - and no, I don't necessarily have the album art of all 2320 albums in my library memorized visually (not to mention the several hundred with missing artwork). Adjusting the volume takes two steps instead of one. I don't know how much time is left in a track. And I can't tell at a glance if the player is playing or paused (What if I've taken a phone call and want to visually ensure I've paused the track...now I can't tell without mousing over the player - a real pain).

One really has to wonder about Apple's design motivations here. The changes in iTunes 11 feel like style over substance...a lot of zoom-y visuals and a paring away of clutter - but that past "clutter" provided important informational feedback about the application, it's status, it's activity and so on.

So...I'd really like to know, Apple, why do you think iTunes 11 is better than the previous version? Why is this an improved user experience? In what way is the stripping away of options and a more confusing, more frustrating interface a step "forward?" As a power-user who has relied on iTunes practically every day since it's inception almost 12 years ago, I'm not seeing it!

So what do I want? I want to be able to go back to the last version (which, after reading through these comments doesn't sound very easy) - OR...I want functionality back! I want usefulness back! I want view options back! I want a mini-player that makes sense back! And I want the reassurance that Apple is thinking through these upgrades and their actual usability before they're released.

You're right on with that kind of thinking. That's exactly what I'd like to see. As I've talked about in these discussions, the idea of an overly simplified interface that is supposed to be oh so easy to use has crossed the line into no longer useful. I would be much more amenable to Apple keeping the options we've grown accustomed to having buried some place but still available rather than just tossing the baby out with the bathwater. I can think of no reason not to have the ability to customize the interface as the user so desires. When will they understand that removing options and dumbing down the application is not an upgrade.