Why is my column browser greyed/grayed out in iTunes 11??

OK. Now a tricky part. Column Browser completely is greyed out in DEVICES.

Any thoughts on managing music on iPhones? Flat list of 1800 tracks? Where are my compilations?..

I got the column browser back by selecting "Songs" view. All is well again.

Ok same issue, different problem.

I only use the library for storage, I do all my listening on my ipod nano, which only has a fraction of the space compared to library size, so I have to manually change the selection of albums I have at any time.

I don't actually need the column browser for library ( use album view with artwork ), nor do I need it on playlists ( don't use at all ), what I do need it for is for viewing contents of my ipod nano, and that seems to be the one thing its impossible to get the browser back for?

Getting albums on to the ipod is easy, just drag the album icon to ipod, but without the column browser, its a real pain trying to find and delete albums on the ipod to free up space.

I have tried the various hints listed in this post, but nothing seems to enable column browser in the devices section, any ideas,or do I have to go back to an older version of itunes?

Quote from above post; select songs and all is well again.

Yep with some trial and error this is what i did and I'm happy with it now, at least I can find all the sub titles under a genre heading for my audio books. still think its a step in the wrong direction, its a mess, wish I had known about all the changes before installing. 😠

Gonna have to revert back. Album artwork doesn't show up in songs view with column browser. I took a lot of time to put in my artwork for every album and liked having the visual. I can't navigate at all through my music with the other views as I have many genres of music I'm in to. I mean seriously, I have to scroll for miles to reach a certain album or mostly I like to browse through my music. This truely is a really dumb update. thanks for the instructions on reverting back.

Indeed. I can't browse my classical music library because the new version won't let me turn on the browser on my new iPhone, even though it shows up just fine on my old iPhone 4. (This is apparently true of playlists as well--if you had it turned on, it stays on, and if you didn't, it's unavailable. This is excruciatingly stupid, and I just sent a note to Apple telling them exactly that, well, not exactly that because the words I used in my feedback wouldn't be allowed by the software posting this message. I guess I'll be joining the downgrading club.

Replying to my own post: I read online that the status of the column browser in playlists depends on whether you set them in iTunes 10. Since I have a bootable backup from June (! I need to get that up to date) I was able to install 10.7, which was required for my new phone, then turned on column browsing for every category on my iPhone 5. Sure enough, it seems to have stuck.

Why should I have to do something like that just to be able to sort my music out of a list of 10K tracks into genres and composers and albums?

Apple, if you're reading, this is excruciatingly stupid. There's no reason to remove features that people like (such as Cover Flow) or depend on for their workflow, *especially* when you're basically making a cosmetic update instead of a true major update, which would fix things like missing artwork if you transcode to AAC, the inability to merge libraries on multiple machines, more options in the column browser, and far too many more issues to mention now.

It is only in "title" view and will display on to of the window, not on the left side

See the Apple logo in the middle... click on 'Songs' just below it.

If this does not fix it, first, click little icon top left of screen, choose 'show menu bar', click 'view' on menus bar, then click 'show sidebar'.

This should fix the problem.

how frustrating - I was editing my playlists and all of a sudden the option was greyed out and not available when right clicking. Turned off (HIDE) sidebar then slected playlists and the edit option came back.

Thanks to all above this solved my problem as well as possible.

And I echo the sentiment: WHY THE F*&^K DOES APPLE KEEP "FIXING" WHAT IS NOT BROKEN. ANNOYING!!!!!

Thank you, I would love to go back to the old version

so much more effective for my big lists of audio books

So many more limitations than the old version, but... will I have to reconvert all my library?

curious, this says it downloads 10.7

am I missing? or can I just reinstall it?

http://support.apple.com/kb/DL1577