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

The new album art work in the list view is ALMOST ok. It works fine as long as you only have full albums. If you force it to show art work for single songs it makes the list view very cluttered and kind of goofy looking.

There has to be away for apple to fix this...I cant beleive with there insitance on album art that they took ALL the album art out of the list view...

From what I can see, the view on the screen with "Always show artwork" selected is the view we used to see for the same option. If the artwork is larger than the listing of just one or two tracks, the extra space will be empty and white in order for the whole album cover to show. I have always relied on this view.

It appears now to be the same. In other words, except for perhaps access time (which may or may not be slower than it was back then) the look is now identical to what I remember. The exception here is that there is still no separate extra album art box at the lower left. That used to show the currently *selected* track artwork.

There is still a problem with the cover art in song-view. I'm a " singles-guy " , that means that for every song I've got different cover art. But for some weird reason songs of the same artist are compiled by Itunes in 1 album. Meaning the same cover art for different singles. But at the positive side, things have changed in the right direction. Using the miniplayer for the cover art now that I'm sure the left corner cover art won't come back, I've discovered that you can drag cover art to the mini player , it changes the cover art and is embedded. I think this because I've done several Itunes-match updates to test it and the cover art stayed the way I wanted it. No more going back after an Itunes-match to the first cover art you've imported 10 years ago .And no more clicking on "get info". <- what a drag. For that I'm very happy.

I made a few discoveries in the way iTunes sorts albums. My own paradigm is LPs and CDs purchased in stores. Even if an artist is the same over a few albums, I want my collection separated by individual albums - and for each one to have the proper cover art. I discovered that the field Album Artist is the overriding field. Sometimes it is left blank and then Artist takes over, or perhaps Album, I forget.

But if something is in the Album Artist field that is how it will be sorted once Album is highlighted as the field to sort on.

So I put each album's catalogue number in the Album Artist field. Every track from one album, no matter how many LPs or CDs, has the same catalogue number in that field. And sorting is never a problem. Everything alphabetizes correctly from there.

I always wanted an iTunes Pro where you could rename fields as you can in many database applications. But alas, you can't. Still if you learn the sort order of iTunes you can get remarkably consistent results.

Eddie Strauss wrote:

I always wanted an iTunes Pro where you could rename fields as you can in many database applications. But alas, you can't. Still if you learn the sort order of iTunes you can get remarkably consistent results.

iTunes has become such massive bloatware that it's time to break it into more manageable pieces. It tries to be too many different things at the same time and the more it's stretched the worse it gets. Maybe there's hope with Ive taking over many of the interface duties.

I know this has been posted before, but maybe there's hope:

http://www.wired.com/gadgetlab/2013/04/how-to-make-itunes-awesome-again/

I've tried the new update and in addition to finally being able to view album art in Songs view, I've found that my songs view filters don't automatically reset by simply switching views. Good news, now we just need a cover art preview method that doesn't involve using Get Info.

However, I've noticed that I can't expand artwork for any song now. When I click on the thumbnail for the currently playing song, it opens the artwork, but it's size is restricted so I can't resize it to fill the screen. I'll play around with the settings some more, but if you truly can't expand album art for even your currently playing track anymore, that's just more baloney coming out of Cupertino.

Command-click the thumbnail and you get the same expandable artwork/control panel as in previous versions.

Thanks Brad for that quick and helpful response! 😀

Thanks Apple for making me use two button presses to do what I use to be able to do in one! 😐

Praise the Lord... thank you so much.. now I can sleep without the other half going on...

I'm sure someone has probably already posted this info somewhere in the 45 pages of responses but just in case:

When viewing your iTunes playlist on your computer, you can still view your album artwork while in "List" view/mode. Go to your Menu bar, click "View" then "Show View Options" then click "Show Album Artwork". You can also edit the columns that you want to view in your playlist such as album title, artist, length, bitrate, etc.

I wasn't a huge fan of the Grid-style playlist because I like my soundtrack albums sorted by year and viewing my playlist in Grid-mode meant that the albums would sort it by artist, which threw the order out of whack. To fix this, follow the same steps as above while viewing your playlist in Grid-mode and then you can choose how you want your albums sorted.

Hope this helps!

I just made an interesting discovery. If you are in Songs view and have album art showing on the left - and if you check "Use large text for list views" in the first pane of the preferences - the artwork will get larger too! 🙂

That is like an easter egg, and the best thing I read so far, thank you

Kim,

Just like you I realize that I was captive to the Apple ecosystem. I still love Macs and Apple in general, but as for iTunes I still use 10.7. How long I continue to use iTunes remains a question.

I decided to pay into the JRiver program Media Center 18 for Mac, which is in Beta. It's still buggy, and has quite a ways to go, but it's getting better. MC18 hasn't replaced iTunes as my library player of choice yet because iTunes 10.7 is still a better program. But that is changing. The main contention points right now are that MC18 Mac doesn't suppport device synching yet like it's Windows counterpart, and that tagging and artwork management are still a bit primitive and a little clumsy as compared to the Windows version. But Jriver is working on getting the bugs out first and then to feature requests.

As for iTunes, I have repeatedly slammed Apple for redesigning an app that didn't need overhauling in the first place. The argument is that it was too large a program for certain basic Windows users (I suppose their computers weren't powerful enough). Since when did Apple become a caterer to Windows users? What about us Apple users, who are actually buying the brand products? In any case, there isn't really a free alternative to iTunes, including the option to buy into the iTunes Store. One solution is to hive off the iTunes Store into its own program. That solution would give iTunes player a chance to breathe and use the free room to expand back into a full featured program.

I have used Feedback many times to ask for features to be brought back into iTunes, but I suppose Apple doesn't want to listen. I don't know what direction Apple is taking. I'm not going to jump ship, but I think a little program restructuring is in order. I feel like my voice is not important to Apple. It's probably true, iTunes 11 has been out for six months at this point, and things just seem to get worse instead of better.

I started using iTunes 12 years ago also. The road hasn't always been smooth (remember iTunes 5?), but I've remained faithful. Now, however, iTunes seems to have been bent to current trends instead of the other way around. It's not the user experience it used to be...and I too say that as a long-time Apple fan.

Kim,

To answer this from your post:

Unless I missed something, it's now impossible to view iTunes cover art under any circumstance at a size larger than 514 x 514 pixels. This makes no sense at all. In 11.0.2, you could drag out the mini player to the maximum dimension available on your monitor.

You can enlarge the artwork just as you used to. When you see the small icon up an the top of the main window where the scroll bar is riding across, you can Command-Click it. You will be then presented with a picture of the album art that you can manipulate just as before. You can hand drag the lower right corner and I think also Cntrl-Clidk (right click on mice) and get a dropdown of view sizes.

I didn't know there was such a thing as Cmd-Click and I certainly didn't see anything about it. But I did read that solution on here and I know it works.