Did iTunes 11 lose "shuffle by album" feature, or am I just too dumb to find it?

Shuffle By Album is still there (Controls > Shuffle > By Album), but what I'm bummed about (and maybe what you're referring to?) is skip by album. I used to be able to use Options + Shift + Right/Left Arrow on Mac to skip an entire album. Now it just skips the track. Is the skip by album feature completely gone now?

I am also struggling on how to skip by album - have been trying all different combinations of keys...if anyone has figured out how to move to next album when shuffling please help!

I also don't see how to just shuffle play by albums within a playlist.

When in playlist mode and looking at albums in grid view, I expect to be able to double-click on an album cover, and then have that album play, and then another album play after that and so on. But instead it just plays through that album, and if repeat is on it repeats that album. If repeat is off it plays that album and then stops.

What am I doing wrong here? This was my normal mode of listening to music in iTunes before 11. Play any track in a playlist and have it shuffle by albums.

Right-button click on the playlist name in the list of playlists brings up a list of things to do to the playlist, one is 'shuffle by album'.

To shuffle all my albums I created a playlist of all my albums, named 'ITUNES11***????!!!!!'. I haven't found any other way to do shuffle all my albums. Anyone have a clew? I tried various things in the album view, including command-a (to select all my albums) but nothing I've found does the trick.

OK, that's somewhat helpful but not intuitive. But normally I want to pick an album to start playing and just have it shuffle new albums on that playlist after that. With this method I see instead of just double-clicking a track, I have to right click on the playlist itself and shuffle it, and then add another album to up next as "play next"? IMO that's totally messed up. Surely there is another way to have it default to this?

You have to quit Itunes, then restart it. Go to Controls and select shuffle by songs. After that right click the itunes logo in the dock and select shuffle. That worked for me. Hope this helps!

No one is talking about shuffling by songs here. We're talking about shuffling by albums.

Use Ctrl-B or the tiny tool at the top left to turn on the menu bar. Or just press Alt to open it temporarily. Shuffle by albums is Alt-C-S-A.

tt2

Basic question here - and I just learned about these options so be gentle with me: Is "shuffle by" inclusive or exclusive? For example, if set to "Shuffle By Album" does it shuffle the entire album (inclusive) or does it play one track of each album never repeating the same album twice in a row (exclusive). Or, does it depend on what you're playing... If I "Shuffle By Album" and I play an album it shuffles only that album, then when I'm playing a playlist it plays exclusively. The latter seems to be true based on the behavior I've observed.

Or is it something different completely. Seems like it should be straightforward.

Shuffle-by-album means: play all the songs on the album in order, and then find a completely different album. Lather, rinse, repeat.

In the old itunes, it was pretty simple. Select some set of albums over which to shuffle. Turn on shuffle by albums. Press Play. Old Itunes also appears to have had a pheechur to skip to the next album, cntrl-alt-meta-shift-fast-forward (or something). I never used it, never knew about it, although I always wanted it. You could also click on any song in any album and it'd play all the rest of the songs in that album and then shuffle on to the next album (a usage model much loved by a different participant in this discussion).

The new itunes doesn't seem to have the skip-to-next-album pheechur.

Getting to shuffle-by-albums is a little baroque in the new itunes--the best we've come up with so far is: create a playlist w/all albums over which to shuffle, and then turn on shuffle-by-album on the new playlist, then press play. The new playlist should be named in such a way to appropriately express your frustration with the new itunes.

Shuffle by Albums isn't much use in the Albums view, since playing any track from an album means play the rest of the tracks and then stop. If you use Shuffle by Albums in the other views it seems to play the remaining tracks from the first album you start playing, then all the tracks of another album chosen at random (within the Genre if viewing Genres), then another album, etc.

tt2

Remarkable. It works. So the entire problem is that I was trying to shuffle-by-album from the album view! What a N00B misteak!

Can we implore turingtest2 who has a much greated understanding of the subtleties of apple's new interface to perhaps figure out how to skip forward by album? I tried all combinations of command/option/control/fn/shift and the >> button, and none seem to do the trick.

Click the little drop down list of Up Next tracks and double-click the first track of the next album. 😉

(If there is a keyboard shortcut, I can't find it 😕)

tt2

Here it is from Help:

Listen to the next or previous album in a list: Shift-Right Arrow or Left Arrow

devedsmith wrote:

Here it is from Help:

Listen to the next or previous album in a list: Shift-Right Arrow or Left Arrow

In that case the feature is currently broken. Holding down shift makes no difference. 😕

tt2