What are your thoughts on the New iTunes 11?

I couldnt agree more. Its as if all the people in charge have taken leave of thier senses. When Itunes 11 came out, I said many of my friends "I am sure that if Steve Jobs where alive, he would slit someones throat over this...trying to make it look like Windows Media Player"

I did download it, gave a fair shot.....I spent hours on the new "improved?" itunes, I could not find the top 100 rock songs in itunes store to save my life. After several hours of google searching....I sent up the white flag, and un installed itunes 11. **** that crap.

there is an old saying in Business that still stand true today. "IF it aint broke.....DONT FIX IT!!!"

For years I have touted that many upgrades have taken place with itunes, yet everyone still knew how to use it because the GUI stayed the same. Then sure as I said that.....it changed. ***?

In the same turn, why is Windows 8 trying to look like an ipad?

I would love to be a fly on the wall in these meetings where change is supposed to help, and have a Nerf bat to smack people upside the head.

This is by far the S T U P I D E S T thing apple has ever done.

I'm aware that it's a far from original observation but I suspect the main problem is that iTunes is simply doing too much. Since it became a sort of command centre for all things iPhone, iPad and iMac the software engine has become distinctly turgid, with the consequence that it ends up doing a huge amount adequately, but not that much terribly well.

For me, the only positive thing that has come out of updating to iTunes 11 (and I was at 10.7 and waited until 11.0.2 to update) is that app updates seem to download MUCH faster. I don't know if the newer iTunes is pulling from different servers, but it really does seem faster in that respect.

Cornel wrote:

I'm aware that it's a far from original observation but I suspect the main problem is that iTunes is simply doing too much. Since it became a sort of command centre for all things iPhone, iPad and iMac the software engine has become distinctly turgid, with the consequence that it ends up doing a huge amount adequately, but not that much terribly well.

I see your observation and raise you 5.... (read on for more, but I think it goes beyond complexity, it goes against what many people consider natural behaviour when using their devices)

I jumped late in the itunes games (I think it was already at 8.0 or even 9.0 by the time I started to use it), but as a software developer myself, I can see how shoehorning requirements into something that was not really designed for it in the first place (e.g. airplay was not even close on anybody's priority list in version 3.0) made it balloon to the beast it has become.

While I applaud apple for wanting to "redesign" it, I think they did it the wrong way. They radically changed the user experience which seems to have either upset, inconvenienced or annoyed somehow every single existing user.

At the end of the day, itunes has become:

1) a media server and storage device

2) a media player and client to its own server or to a remote media server

3) a media manager (managing metadata and including synchonrizing to the cloud)

4) a device manager (copying to devices like the ipood)

5) a store front

6) A wrapper/container to access the various other components

Each component listed above is in essence a separate component or should be a separate component. If they did their job right, apple should not have had to touch components #1, #2 or #4 at all. Component #3 again hasn't had to change much, if any at all.

The biggest problem is #6 which is essentially how the overall "itunes" application looks and behaves. Why is it when you click around from playlist to playlist, it has to forget which song you had highlighted from the previous playlist? Who thought that would make the user experience better?

If you read this article, which is about the windows 8 UI design:

http://www.computerworld.com/s/article/9233884/Windows_8_UI_strategic_mistake_ar gues_design_guru

one of the points he makes (the single-window mode) puts too much of a burden on the user to remember what to do (e.g. copy/paste between applications), and memory is too fragile in humans to be able to be used effectively.

If I have to manage several playlists (e.g. I want to compare the contents of two playlists and copy some of the songs from one to another) it used to be, not only could I open separate windows to see them side by side, but even if I kept to the single window model of version 10.7, if I selected a song as a mental reminder of where I was (a kind of task place holder), and switch to the other to compare, I could at least be sure I knew where I was when I came back.

In version 11, not only are separate windows a bad idea, but keeping track of individual playlist entities (individual shuffle setting, selected songs) are treated as torture devices straight from ****, so better not have any of those silly things, and best pull them out.

It goes beyond kruft and feature creep and an attempt to simplify the user experience, to me, it's simply preventing people from working naturally and organically... Why the **** should I have to jot down on a piece of paper the song I was on when I bounce between one playlist and another to add/remove/compare/manage them lest I forget my place in the playlist? Remembering with perfect accuracy is what electronic devices are supposed to be good at, so why put the burden back on us to do it for them?

And that is another example of why version 11 seems to frustrate so many people.

pegaudet wrote:

In version 11, not only are separate windows a bad idea, but keeping track of individual playlist entities (individual shuffle setting, selected songs) are treated as torture devices straight from ****, so better not have any of those silly things, and best pull them out.

It goes beyond kruft and feature creep and an attempt to simplify the user experience, to me, it's simply preventing people from working naturally and organically... Why the **** should I have to jot down on a piece of paper the song I was on when I bounce between one playlist and another to add/remove/compare/manage them lest I forget my place in the playlist? Remembering with perfect accuracy is what electronic devices are supposed to be good at, so why put the burden back on us to do it for them?

And that is another example of why version 11 seems to frustrate so many people.

Very well said! The Win8 article was excellent also. I have a W8 machine I use for an RC flight simulator and I absolutely HATE it.

I'm baffled how these mistakes are arising. For example, with iOS, in order to increase font sizes on a web page or just a plain document, you have to zoom and since there is no repagination, it forces the user to scroll sideways. It has been well established that scolling up and down acceptable in a UI, but not sideways. Why? Because to read any sentence, you have to scroll back and forth. It's stupid and it's unnatural, and it's a time waster. It's simply wrong.

This stuff is well known. So, how come Apple and Microsoft are designing UIs that don't work? I am completely baffled.

You can go the Pacifist + iTunes 10.7 route with the new 27" iMac. My sister bought one last month, and I just installed iTunes 10.7 on it using Pacifist. No problems. She had to copy over her old library files (from her old laptop), but I had advised her not to do any managment before I could replace the native iTunes with version 10.7 (not that management is anything like something a user would WANT to do on iTurd 11). She, therefore, didn't even lose any library data.

WHOOPEE!!! Important news. None of the real problems have been fixed with 11.0.3 but holy water drip we have a new album view in the mini player! Does anyone really give a f&#& about an album view in the mini player?

Nice to see the itunes team is really on the ball giving us (returning) features we all want and need.

😟

FWIW there is a non-intuitive way to get something like the old Album List view back via View > View Options and CD insert printing is fixed (again). 👿

tt2

Update doesn't come close to cutting it.

Just installed iTunes 11.0.3. Indeed you can force display of artwork in songs view, but you can't DRAG artwork in if there is none, and when you drag from the art display you get the full song, not the artwork.

Still no multiple windows.

Back to iTunes 10.7 I go.

You can still copy artwork in and out of the Get Info. dialog, but if multiple windows are a must then 10.7 it is. 😐

tt2

Get Info is fine in a pinch, especially because you can select and change parameters on multiple songs at once. But the old album art preview window is 1000x faster for viewing, adding and extracting artwork.

I need BOTH artwork in a list view AND multiple windows. I'll stay with version 10.

RogerOut wrote:

WHOOPEE!!! Important news. None of the real problems have been fixed with 11.0.3 but holy water drip we have a new album view in the mini player! Does anyone really give a f&#& about an album view in the mini player?

Nice to see the itunes team is really on the ball giving us (returning) features we all want and need.

😟

Well, la-dee-frackin-da....... 11.0.3 can now maintain the active states between playlists, so luckily, my rant last week was almost 7 days too late.... and yes, nice to see they are putting back in some of the features that suddenly went missing in this redesign, though, I think by now a lot more stuff should have been reverted.

Here's an annoying gotcha though that might have been introduced at any time...

I sync my "real" itunes (version 10.7) to my network raid drive as a backup and I have a shadow install on a virtualbox running 11.0.3, pointing its media back to the network drive.

After another rash of windows updates and the reboots that go with it, I launched itunes before I re-authenticated to my network storage device, but itunes flagged all 14,000+ songs as "unavailable", so no more bulk edits... I can go individual edits and it's smart enough to figure out the files are available again when it goes to check the individual file, but as for a bulk availability check, nope.... sorry.... forget it.

I also discovered that at LEAST with this version, bulk edits (e.g. fix a slight typo in an album name, so not that many songs... 19 in my test case) will not even be attempted on songs if they are flagged with the exclamation "unavailable" icon, even though one might think they would take that opportunity to see if the files had become available again in the interim....

Or for that matter, if a file on a drive that suddenly became available again was determined to be valid again, that it might think to itself "hmmm.. maybe they are all available now???"

Somehow, I just don't feel the love....

Things I hate about iTunes 11.

The forward and back buttons are now gone when editing a list of songs in bulk. You have to remember where you were in a list and research for that position when you edit the next song in a list of songs.

Album art is now small… why bother anymore. The experience of visually browsing is gone. I feel way less emotionaly connected about my albums now.

All backgrounds are boring white and the cool drama is gone. it is like a database not an experience.

Book genres are now gone. No way to organize by genera, and Books and PDFs are now filed separately even though they might both really be books. So a PDF mystery book and iTunes mystery book are now in separate categories by there file type.

TV shows now show every piece of crap I ever downloaded in the list. You can't rent TV shows, you must buy them, so junk I bought is now permanently part of my library history.

Down load cue showing progress of downloads or iDevice syncing now can no longer monitored via the min-player while doing other work.

If you have listened to a song or watched a movie after starting iTunes the status window won't clear the (paused) song/movie info like it used to so that background activities can be monitored. So if you what to see the progress of an activity you have to restart iTunes.

When switching between library areas (music, movies, books, etc) and a device iTunes now forgets your place in the library list. So if you were comparing the content in your library to the content on a device you have to research for the strict every time you switch.

How do I get back to 10

cpb

The latest version of iTunes 11 is almost ready for me. I now can have artwork in a list view. And there are 3 size options instead of 2 as there were in iTune 10. The interface is a bit odd though. On the path to add a column with artwork, I often end up with two album/artist columns. Strange. And then I have to delete one. And the grid views are all just useless. I can't find anything in a grid view. My eyes can only scan in one dimension. I'm still waiting for multiple windows. I need to see the store and my collection in two different windows. Even if they add that, I don't see that there are any added benefits of iTunes 11 over version 10. Why did they bother? So I'm staying with version 10 until they add something to version 11 that I don't already have.