Q: What are your thoughts on the New iTunes 11?

What thoughts?

Change for the better is good, change for the worse is bad. Pretty simple!

And with iTunes 11 most changes are for the worse. It delivers far less functionality than the old version and the layout, etc. is cheap bling that looks ugly. You just have to look at the play buttons and the genre icons to puuuuuke!

Thanks for upgrading to iTunes 10.7 

Craig DM wrote:

 

Wow. This doesn't even look like it's from Apple. When I first opened it, I honestly thought that I may have been fooled by a hacker into installing fake software. It's that bad.

 

Besides the well-documented (above) functionality flubs, it's simply ugly. The typefaces are amateurish and inelegant. This looks like a kid designed it in his/her basement. Sorry...I didn't mean to insult kids. With this release, Apple has gone from the gold standard of user interface design to something done by a bunch of engineer hacks with no design aesthetic. VERY disappointing.

Great minds think alike and post at the same time

So after 15 hours of uploading songs to my iPhone, I had to go somewhere with the phone. When I hooked it back to resume uploading songs, the sync failed. It turned out that the "Fill free space with songs" option got set. I have never in my freakin' life ever set that POS option.

I swear that iTunes keeps resetting random options. I've had to turn off the iCloud option like a dozen times.

Apple in case you're listening, I never ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever want my phone (or iPad) filled with random sh*t. That goes for your crap in the Cloud, or other random songs in my own library. If I want them on my iPhone or iPad, I will add them. That's why God invented playlists.

Did your mommas drop you on your heads?

Oh yeah, I had to start the upload process all over again. So while that's happening, iTunes is a paperweight (seriously, up to 10 second beach ball lock ups while it converts my ALAC songs to AAC 256).

This ain't rocket science Apple. Hire some guys with actual programming chops to multithread this POS and get the performance up to an acceptable level. Hire a professional UI design company to design the UI (Alan Cooper is your neck of the woods). If you not know any guys who fit these qualifications, email me. I know a bunch.

Basic features in iTunes that have been around for years are gone, and issues that have plagued iTunes for years, since iOS came to be, are still problems that are not getting fixed.  Yeah the software plays music, but the flow of the program is awful, features such as shortcut access to edit windows are gone, play orders are wrong, etc.  Apple needs to get their software developement figured out, because it ain't all that.  Will be awaiting the next quick release of the next update to this mess shortly.  I will lay money down it is updated again in two weeks.

Steven, blaming some kind of Luddite-like resistance to change, as reason for our dissatisfaction with this new iTunes is quite disingenuous, and yes, a bit insulting. Most of here love innovation & improvement & change for the better. However, we don't love change for the sake of change, nor change that makes what was working just fine, not work so fine, and that has zero to do with any fear of change. And to say Apple may make mistakes, but "listens to us", well, I have not seen much of that, in the past ten years or so. Many of us have offered up a great deal of constructive criticism of various products, yet most tends to land on deaf ears. I'm still waiting for a Safari that doesn't run up it's RAM usage, slow & stall, then freeze or crash, or even a Help section anything close to the one years ago, that actually did provide help, etc. etc, etc. 

Those here who mentioned that many changes are the result of developers adding more & more bells & whistles, not realizing we in the real world actually need our computers to accomplish tasks & to do work, so don't relish having to continually learn new ways to do the things that worked better before their "advancements", are spot on. And the person who suggested they keep all the special effects advancements to the mobile devices, and leave the desktops/laptops to innovations that actually improve their functioning, was also spot on. Eliminating useful functions in order to make the already slim iMac even slimmer, or lighter, is simply ridiculous; they need to perhaps survey their customer base, as they've quite obviously forgotten what life is like for those outside the "developers' bubble", who care little for bling & dazzle, and just want computers & software that get the job done.

Agreed. 

Hasn't been much innovation at Apple in quite a while.  Lots of reworks, flops, updates, errors, redesigns, reshuffling of executives, etc.  Nothing really new at all, and nothing new in the forseeable future.  Sad.

*****!  I just need to move music, movies, etc. onto my iPhone/iPod.  I like simple and straight forward.  Why did they mess with it?  Why did I blindly download it?  I still haven't updated my iPhone to IOS 6 over the maps issue. Apple has lost it. 

Well, you do have the iPad mini....LOL! 

I hate the loss of Cover Flow, especially since Apple has indicated that they will not bring it back. Cover Flow was by far the most natural and visually pleasing way to use iTunes.

I like that Apple restored the colored icons it took away a couple of years ago. I like the way that Podcasts are now displayed. I like the new Expanded Albums view. Very nice! But without Cover Flow, iTunes 11 is a big fail.

This morning I was scanning receipts and documents with Paperless from Mariner software. Its GUI is essentially a clone of iTunes 10, which makes it very easy to use. The default view is "Flow," which is the equivalent of Cover Flow. It gives you a list view of sortable columns with the Cover Flow graphics of all your documents on top. I can't imagine using that program without seeing my documents as I search & sort, just as I hate using iTunes 11 without seeing my album artwork as I search and sort in Songs view.

The iTunes 11 release stinks in a number of ways. Announcing a release date and then pushing incomplete software, just so you can say you did it, is terrible business and is indicitive of a company focused on stock prices and not product quality. Does anyone remember when Apple didn't release anything to a schedule?  Updates and innovation were less frequent but at least they were meaningful. iTunes 11 would have never gotten out the door four years ago. It's a sign of the slide in quality at Apple as it shifted focus from quality to quantity.

Pretty frustrated. I cannot for the life of me find the button which determines what devices iTune plays to . Confused and frustrated.

     ScottGrahamMpls

      Pretty frustrated. I cannot for the life of me find the button which determines what devices iTune plays to . Confused and frustrated.

On the top bar next to the volume control. Which to be fair, is quite a logical place to put it.

In a word, crap! Its slow for me and crashes every time I important movie artwork and so corrupting the file making it unplayable! I had no problems with the last iTunes. You know what they say, if it aint broke...