What are your thoughts on the New iTunes 11?

iTunes 11 *****!!! Do NOT upgrade if you are using v10 or previous!!

They have eliminated gapless playback of albums, so now EVERY song on a mixed DJ set or Pink Floyd's Dark Side of the Moon (or millions of other albums) - each track will have a 1 second gap between them. COmpletely ruining the way the album was meant to be listened to.

They reverse-engineered and went back to crappy playback like Android and Windows OS phones USED to do. Doesn't make much sense does it?

I repaeat - do NOT upgrade to iTunes 11, you will be severely disappointed.

For those that have already upgraded and lost gapless playback, submit a Feedback request and demand for gapless playback to be brought back into iTunes ASAP!!! FIll out the form here:

http://www.apple.com/feedback/itunesapp.html

iTunes 11 is utter rubbish. It was already bloated enough, but they took away everything that was intuitive. We are all having to work around and find new ways of doing things that worked perfectly well . It spends half its life cueing up songs I am trying to find, it took me hours to find out you can sort of make it look like itunes 10 but not actually behave like itunes 10. I have, for the first time in years, got some different software to manage my music.

Apart from the podcast app iTunes 11 is the worst software apple have produced in years. I cannot understand how this got through QA or UAT

randynchicago wrote:

... They have eliminated gapless playback of albums, so now EVERY song on a mixed DJ set or Pink Floyd's Dark Side of the Moon (or millions of other albums) - each track will have a 1 second gap between them. COmpletely ruining the way the album was meant to be listened to....

... For those that have already upgraded and lost gapless playback, submit a Feedback request and demand for gapless playback to be brought back into iTunes ASAP!!!

Randy, that is a misunderstanding of how Gapless Playback used to work; iTunes 11 did not eliminate the gapless playback feature that has been in iTunes for the last few years. Most of the reviewers of iTunes 11 explained all this last December, so here's a link:

http://www.ilounge.com/index.php/articles/comments/gapless-playback-in-itunes-11 /

What has been eliminated is the need to manually add a tag that disables the crossfading preference. The reason it was removed by Apple is that iTunes always determines gapless playback of albums automatically, and iTunes 11 disables crossfading of gapless albums automatically. That's the way it should be! This is an unquestionable improvement. iTunes 10 confused the issue of how Gapless Playback worked, and required extra manual steps to disable the crossfading of gapless tracks (which obviously should not be crossfaded), so many users thought the feature was doing something it wasn't doing.

I did a demo of iTunes for a group of audiophiles last weekend, and I played Dark Side, Abraxas and a Britten piece (broken up into numerous small sections on the hybrid SACD, which I ripped) to demonstrate that tracks will always flow seemlessly from one cut to another on albums that have no gaps -- no need for manual tagging.

Mark: I am not lying. I think there is a lot more to gapless playback than what most people know, but I dont really care on how it works - it doesn't work on my iTunes 11 collection of music SINCE I upgraded to iTunes 11. I also used Apple Tech Support, had them call me and I then told the gentleman on the phone that all my albums used to playback without a pause (not even a split second) now all tracks on all albums pause betweem each track. The tech support guy told me to go into Preferences and Check Crossfade and mmove the bar all the way to the left (1 second). I then went back played a track listened as the track was about to cut over and (BAM) 1 second of silence, then the second track started to play. The tech support guy had me hold on for a couple of minutes came back and said iTunes 11 dropped the gap-less playback. I have 1000s of these albums in my collection and they do NOT work in iTunes 11 on OS X 10.8.2.

iTunes 11 (still) ***** and it has ruined my collection of music that I had put a lot of time into.

randynchicago: I totally agree, I refuse to go to iTunes 11, at best it is a downgrade. I missed coverflow and other things that made it more customizable. What Apple needs to do is make it more customizable, I have tried tons of of other software and I loved iTunes because it was easy to use and it was easy to find my music and all my files worked. Now it just *****, gap-less playback is a must in some cases. I went back to iTunes 10 and yes you can do it, and I refuse to use 11 untill they flipping fix it! 89 post on just this thread alone with mostly negative feedback and most users that don't even come to here, are asking me to put 10 back on their computers. I liked the fact I could scroll through and also see a list below using coverflow. **** I even miss Front Row, I wish they would have used that format for Apple TV and iTunes.

randynchicago wrote:

... The tech support guy had me hold on for a couple of minutes came back and said iTunes 11 dropped the gap-less playback. I have 1000s of these albums in my collection and they do NOT work in iTunes 11 on OS X 10.8.2.

Obviously that tech support guy didn't know what he was talking about. Gapless playback still works in iTunes 11; it has not been removed. When tracks are imported, iTunes analyzes the the tracks to determine if there is any silence at all at the head and tail of the tracks.

I believe you when you say it's not working for you, and apparently it's not working as expected for others, but it seems to be a system specific problem. For the vast majority of users, for all the tech reviewers and for everyone I know, Gapless Playback is still working perfectly in iTunes 11, so I can't figure out if there's something in common with the systems that won't play gaplessly. I wonder if something went wrong with your installation of iTunes 11; perhaps the Gapless Playback analysis got interrupted or corrupted in some way. If I were you I'd reinstall it after running Onyx to make sure your system files are OK. You could also do a test by moving a known gapless album, such as Dark Side, out of your iTunes music folder and deleting the songs in iTunes, then reimporting the album to see if the "determing gapless playback" analysis runs. Try that also with a fresh CD rip. If it now works, then I'd conclude that your iTunes 11 installation got screwed up. And I'll reiterate what Jesse Hollington said:

"It’s also important to keep in mind that even gapless albums will only play gaplessly when played back in the standard album order. If you enable shuffle mode or mix these tracks into a playlist in a different order, they will be played with the normal small gaps between the tracks.

"The bottom line is that iTunes 11 continues to handle gapless albums as it always has. The only impact that the removal of the Part of a Gapless Album option has is that users will no longer be able to choose whether to override gapless playback with crossfading when listening to tracks directly in iTunes."

Yeah, I tried this just now and you're right about the out of order (or mixed) playlist.

It does work differently in this case, I was trying for a crossfade but didn't get it, but there was no silence between the tracks. I have the slider set to 8 seconds. No crossfade, but no gap either.

I rather liked the crossfade, but oh well.

Itunes has been too big and bloated for a long long time

It should be split into several different programs:

- itunes store

- library manager (would also perform device backups and syncs)

- player (which I persoanlly would never use)

- downloader (which would just run in the background and doanload all subscriptions automatically)

- server (which would also just run in the background and do the homeshare function)

Just my two cents ;-)

It is absolutely and positively horrible. It is NOT intuitive at all. I can't figure out how to move songs purchased on my iphone to itunes or to any other playlist. The older version was so easy.

Why do they do this to us? We should have to option of the old version versus this crappy, cut-rate, need-a-PhD-in-computer-sciences version!!

So I gave 11 an honest shake, and it is honestly horrible.

So many little annoyances, I went back to 10.7 today and I've turned off automatic updates. From now on I'm keep a wary eye on anything from Apple and I'm strongly inclined to use any Apple alternative.

Also, I guess I shound't be surprised that 99% of my previous posts are now deleted from this thread...

“The technology crashed and burned at Xerox. Why? I learned more about this with John Sculley later on. What happens is, John came from Pepsico. And they—at most—would change their product once every 10 years. To them, a new product was a new sized bottle. So if you were a ‘product person’, you couldn’t change the course of that company very much. So, who influences the success at Pepsico? The sales and marketing people. Therefore they were the ones that got promoted, and they were the ones that ran the company. Well, for Pepsico that might have been okay, but it turns out the same thing can happen at technology companies that get monopolies. Like IBM and Xerox. If you were a ‘product person’ at IBM or Xerox: so you make a better copier or better computer. So what? When you have a monopoly market-share, the company’s not any more successful. So the people who make the company more successful are the sales and marketing people, and they end up running the companies. And the ‘product people’ get run out of the decision-making forums. The companies forget how to make great products. The product sensibility and product genius that brought them to this monopolistic position gets rotted out by people running these companies who have no conception of a good product vs. a bad product. They have no conception of the craftsmanship that’s required to take a good idea and turn it into a good product. And they really have no feeling in their hearts about wanting to help the costumers.”

Steve Jobs

The iTunes store could also be greatly improved by allowing me to pick priorities of categories.

For example:

I shop mostly for TV so priositize that over music and movies.

I never buy HD content so allow me to pick a default instead of always going to HD

I'm with a lot of people here. Apple removed most of the features that I used or liked (playing podcasts in DJ or Album view, simple click 'n' play and more) and replaced them with features I dislike and even hate in some cases.

1. Play Next? ***? The whole reason I liked DJ was to be able to play podcasts back to back without having to stop working (I sew, in part, for a living) to start the next one and they removed it. Ugh!

2. Used to be that you could easily click on a song to play it. Now, it constantly asks me if I want to play it instead of F-in Play Next. Can I disable the most lame idea ever?

3. Album view was at least interesting. I mostly play albums or mixed songs, therefore the current views have almost no use in my world other than the new version of album if you can manage not to have an extra 10 keystrokes to get the thing to play properly.

4... the list of annoyances goes on.

verbcrunch wrote:

“The technology crashed and burned at Xerox. Why? I learned more about this with John Sculley later on. What happens is, John came from Pepsico. And they—at most—would change their product once every 10 years. To them, a new product was a new sized bottle. So if you were a ‘product person’, you couldn’t change the course of that company very much. So, who influences the success at Pepsico? The sales and marketing people. Therefore they were the ones that got promoted, and they were the ones that ran the company. Well, for Pepsico that might have been okay, but it turns out the same thing can happen at technology companies that get monopolies. Like IBM and Xerox. If you were a ‘product person’ at IBM or Xerox: so you make a better copier or better computer. So what? When you have a monopoly market-share, the company’s not any more successful. So the people who make the company more successful are the sales and marketing people, and they end up running the companies. And the ‘product people’ get run out of the decision-making forums. The companies forget how to make great products. The product sensibility and product genius that brought them to this monopolistic position gets rotted out by people running these companies who have no conception of a good product vs. a bad product. They have no conception of the craftsmanship that’s required to take a good idea and turn it into a good product. And they really have no feeling in their hearts about wanting to help the costumers.”

Steve Jobs

That is an incomplete, almost naive understanding of how things work. Jobs completely ignores nature, and that nothing is permanent. A 100 year old oak tree rots from the inside out and it happens no matter how well you take care of it. Apple's biggest problem and challenge is to remain close enough to their customers to LISTEN to them, even if they're not saying a word. Silence is a statement of meaning. I don't know if Apple understands that. Success is a not about a product, it's about how people perceive the value the product offers them.

I've been around a lot "product people" over the years and they can be just as clueless as sales and marketing... "Build a better mouse trap and people will beat a path to your door..." Why did Emerson speak those words? Because he disliked and distrusted sales people. Really, he did! lol

I stand by my statement that Apple has become too big and how they will continue producing products we want to buy is going to be interesting. Clearly they're not listening to the average user. In recent cases of new software products in particular, like Final Cut ProX, iTunes, even Logic, who the heck they're talking to is beyond me. Maybe aliens from Mars? Who knows?