Thanks - that fixed the issue. I also found this thread yesterday that help you or others with the same issue.
Ok, I just found a solution in another thread. You need to go to Preferences > General, and uncheck the "Show list checkboxes" option. Then playing albums works as expected. Pretty unintuitive, but at least there's a fix.
I do get the logic behind this, but still think it's a mistake, for a few reasons. The idea is that if you have the checkboxes feature turned on, then you use checkboxes to make iTunes ignore unchecked songs unless you explicitly ask to play them. So clicking play on an album with no checked songs doesn't do anything. There are a few problems with this though.
- First of all, if Apple is going to turn this option on by default, then they should also make it so all songs are checked by default. As it is, at least using iTunes Match, all songs are unchecked by default, which means we get this wacky behavior.
- Second, in Albums view you can't see the checkboxes even when the option is enabled. Since Albums view is the default view now, it's unlikely a user would even accidentally stumble on the solution of checking the songs, since they don't see any checkboxes.
- Third, the option is mis-labeled, since it does more than just make the checkboxes visible or not, it also changes whether they get used or not. It should probably be called "Use checkboxes" or something like that, to indicate that it's not just changing whether you see them, but also whether they get used to control what gets played.
