You can make a difference in the Apple Support Community!

When you sign up with your Apple Account, you can provide valuable feedback to other community members by upvoting helpful replies and User Tips.

📰 Newsroom Update

Billie Eilish is Apple Music’s Artist of the Year for 2024. Learn more >

Looks like no one’s replied in a while. To start the conversation again, simply ask a new question.

iTunes 11: No more album art preview for selected track??? :(

For me, iTunes 11 is much worse than iTunes 10.



You can no longer view album art by selecting a track in list view.


In list view, album art is invisible — the album art square in the lower left-hand corner is gone. So unless the track is playing, you can't see album art. This is terrible news for people who need list view, like DJs. People like me who rely on album art to remember what an album is, can no longer just click around and see the covers. This was a tremendous memory aid, which is now gone.


Now to see album covers, you have to either play the track, or switch to grid or artist list — which show either no tracks, or very few tracks.


Bummer.


MacBook Pro, OS X Mountain Lion (10.8.2)

Posted on Nov 29, 2012 2:11 PM

Reply
709 replies

Dec 1, 2012 1:54 PM in response to Kim Hill1

iTunes 11 improved a lot of stuff that I DON'T CARE ABOUT.


Everything I do care about, it makes worse. The art preview is the worst one. That is unforgivable. But the loss of album covers in the list view is pretty close to unforgivable also.


The whole "Up Next" thing is cool, but I don't use it! For me iTunes is for music management, NOT for playing songs (which I do on IOS). So what use is iTunes 11 to me? It's like we've stepped back to 2005 or something.

Dec 1, 2012 2:09 PM in response to chrisfromturner

"For me iTunes is for music management, NOT for playing songs (which I do on IOS)."



This is exactly where I'm coming form, though when I play songs it's often through an iPod connected to a pair of powered desktop speakers or streamed wirelessly to the stereo in my living room.



For me iTunes is the card catalog of my muusic library. Viewing artwork when I'm doing mainenance on it is just as important as seeing the song name, artist, track, bit rate, etc.


I understand that many people only think of iTunes as a playback device, but for those of us who have large libraries (65K songs) we need something more like a spreadsheet or database.

Dec 1, 2012 2:17 PM in response to Steve Gallagher

Steve, The sad truth now is that iTunes is a money making machine for selling mp3 tracks of music. Everyrthing in iTunes is geared to get you to click on something that takes you to the store to buy more.


The field for software to categorize music and play it at the same time has been owned by Apple for so long that there isn't much competition. The super fidelity programs are all made as add-ons to iTunes. That's how universal it is.


Perhaps now the stage is set for programmers with intense interest in database personalization to come forth and do their thing. Classical music collectors have always been also-rans. I put my album catalogue numbers in the Album Artist field. I learned that that takes sort preference over any other.

Dec 1, 2012 3:47 PM in response to Kim Hill1

The worst part of the album art gone is: not only is the simple drag-and-drop addition of album art no longer possible for multiple items, it also means that via "get Info" we're now stuck with the nasty habit of of converting JPG to PNG, which quadruples the size of the image added to each and every file. This didn't happen with drag-and-drop to the album art area that's no longer there. So I'm downgrading to iTunes 10, at least on the Mac I use for tag editing. :-(

Dec 1, 2012 3:54 PM in response to Kim Hill1

I really dislike the new iTunes 11 "Loss of Album Art Viewing customizations". Album art is no longer shown when playing a playlist! This simply stinks. I also hate how small all of my album art is now. I used to be able to view them bigger. Why did I spend so much time inserting my own scanned HQ album art in the past for? only for it to be shrunk down like iTunes 11? AWFUL!!!!! Fix it please!

Dec 1, 2012 3:56 PM in response to Kim Hill1

Like many of you who love album cover art, I'd been planning ahead (for years!) in the expectation that iTunes would be displaying cover art larger and larger.


Almost all my albums have either 1000x1000 or 1500x1500 art embedded now.


So it was rather a shock to find iTunes 11 makes the album art smaller than ever, instead of larger than ever.


Definitely not what I expected. I hope Apple is listening. Album art is more important than a spreadsheet for people who think conceptually/visually, rather than in words. It should be an important part of iTunes.

Dec 1, 2012 4:16 PM in response to richfromer

Welcome to the way apple does business. Apple has been doing things like this for years; losing features. With apple, when you download a app it does not show what permissions or access the app has on your device. Android shows a list of what access the apps you download can do/read. Do you really want a wallpaper app (or unknown dev) to be able to read your text messages. Apple does not allow the customer to know what the app can do. Apple has a bad ecosystem.

Back to the iTunes issue, I hate it! Who is in charge of this company? Someone needs to be fired, and it should start at the top down.!

Dec 1, 2012 4:26 PM in response to Kim Hill1

I agree with everyone here, overall it's an improvement but the lack of cover art preview is a big no-no. It wouldn't be so bad if I could at least have the column browser with the "Artists" viewstyle.


I too have a huge library, so visual identification is key since I can't possibly remember every artist/album title.

Dec 1, 2012 7:27 PM in response to Kim Hill1

I'm about as loyal as apple users get, and they screwed the pooch on this one. Just dumb planning. Did they want us to know it was a new version by not letting us see the album artwork? Is no one minding the store? I may have to use time machine and restore version 10. Version 11 has nothing new that seems of use to me and took away the most useful way to browse my music collection. What's the point of getting everything into itunes if you can't even see what the album art is unless you play something? Is that how our record collections worked? You couldn't see the cover of Let it Bleed until it was spinning on your turntable? Hardly. Come on apple. You can do better. We expect better. For this first try at version 11, I say Let it Bleed.

To be fair, I do like that you can now actually view your podcasts and look at just the unplayed ones. That is an improvement.

You've got to hope they'll put back the preview window though. I mean, it's gotta be what, a few lines of code. Why remove it in the first place? Don't they have any actual users try this stuff before they release it?

iTunes 11: No more album art preview for selected track??? :(

Welcome to Apple Support Community
A forum where Apple customers help each other with their products. Get started with your Apple Account.