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

This works for me:

• Turn on Shuffle by Album
• Go to Albums view
• Click play to start a random album
• Don't like it? Shift-click the big fat pause button. Then click play again. A fresh random album starts playing.

That doesn't work for me at all. Shift click pause just pauses, and play resumes what was playing before.

In any case, this is not the issue, the issue is automatically moving on to a new random album in shuffle mode after the current one has finished.

Sorry to hear that, it works like a charm for me. Make sure you have no albums highlighted/selected when you try this.

Umm, this is the issue. We're looking for the old keyboard shortcut Shift-Left or Shift-Right that jumped to the next random album, which appears to be documented but not working. The random album shuffle when the end of the current album is reached is working just fine.

I was also missing the easy shuffle by album of previous releases. I've got a solution for iTunes 11 that's just as good (for me anyway.) It's similar to some of the posts in this thread, but not quite the same. Here's what I finally settled on.

1. Set Controls->Shuffle->By Album. This sets the default shuffle mode to albums.

2. Create a Smart Playlist with the condition being "Media Kind" is "Music". This creates a playlist of all your music.

3. Check the "Live updating" box. This will pick up new music that you add, or existing music that you edit or delete.

4. Rename the playlist. I called mine "My Music".

5. Right-click the playlist and select "Shuffle My Music". It shuffles your entire library by album.

Here's something else I wish it would do. I like to display the playlist by album, but the currently playing song/album is not updated when I do that. I wish the currently playing album would be selected and expanded so I could see the songs and the one that is currently playing. For now, I have to find the album that is currently playing and manually select it to get this behavior.

Press Ctrl-L to reveal the currently playing track.

Oops, maybe that is another "missing" feature... 😕

Aha, fails to work properly when the "sidebar" is showing. It reveals the correct list, but doesn't display the playing song. Hide the sidebar and it works as expected. So much for simplicity! 👿

tt2

Message was edited by: turingtest2

Just updated Itunes today, and the new version has the old album shuffle feature back where you can skip to next album (random shuffle) with the Shift and Right Arrow button!! YEAH!!!

Only issue I noticed (not sure if it is same as prior) is if you Shift and Left Arrow to go back, it goes to last song in prior album versus starting at beginning of prior album.

Do you know if this has been fixed in the V11.1 or not? Just curious. Man, there are a lot of bugs in this release....

Yes... I've already provided some "friendly" feedback on that particular bug in "Go to Current Song".

Whether it works with the old sidebar open depends on if your playlists are nested in folders or not. If they are nested in folders, then the "Go to" function will only bring you as far as the folder tree is currently expanded. If the path to the currently playing list is fully expanded, or if your playlist is sitting at the top of the folder tree (messy messy!), Ctrl+L will work correctly.

As stated above, Shuffle by Album is enabled under the Control menu. You then need to turn it On in the same menu.

In order to skip a whole album, press the Alt key then the FWD button. What I can't seem to find is to then get iTunes to start at the beginning of the next album