iTunes 11 - How do you Sort by Genre then Artist? Other General Customizations

Hello,

Maybe somebody else knows how to do this, if so please post it. I am really disappointed in iTunes ever since version 10 I think, where they majorly revamped the whole look for it. No, I am not one of those people who are opposed to change and are slow to adapt when changes are made to applications either. I just feel these new changes majorly suck.

So I am using version 11, the latest one. Apple has made it so uncustomizable that it is ridiculous. Correct me if I am wrong in saying this, that you can’t do any of this stuff anymore. When I open iTunes I like to be able to select Genres and then have the music within the Genre sorted by artist. I don’t see how you can do this anymore. Now when you click on Genre there is no longer an option to sort anything. Everything is sorted by CD Name and you aren’t allowed to sort it any other way. Seriously, who really knows the name of every CD they own, especially when you have several 100 CDs?

So if I want to view my music by artist I have to select Artists, which that lists all artists (regardless of genre). I hate this because then it is harder to find the exact artist you are looking for because the list is that much longer and you are scrolling through a ton more artists just to get to the one you are looking for. Yes, I already know there is a search library feature. I also like viewing the artist by Genre because it is easier to determine if the newly added CD was placed in the correct Genre. I know some people just add music and don’t care where it is placed or how it is organized, but I like to keep it all organized. I even have it organized on my computer by folders Genres, folders Artists, and then folders CDs.

This is the same for viewing your Playlists. You used to be able to select your playlists and then view a specific genre within that playlist. From there I could sort the playlist however I wanted, like by artists, and then CD. I have several playlists that have more than one genre in it. With this new version you can’t view your playlist by genre, you can only view all of the songs within the playlist.

I also liked in the old version how you could view the number of songs in each genre. Well, you can still do this once you click on the genre, but there isn’t an overview anymore. Like in the old version it would list all the genres and then in a caption underneath each genre it would show how many songs and different artists are in each genre. There was no need to go into each individual genre to view this information. You could also view the number of songs in each genre within each playlist as well. The playlist thing has been removed altogether. Now you can only view how many songs are in the playlist, regardless of genre.

The new version does have a few tiny benefits, like easily being able to see what playlist(s) a particular song is in by right clicking on a song and then selecting Show in Playlists. I however, don’t feel the tiny tweaks outweigh the view customizable benefits of previous versions. These new tweaks could have easily been added to the older versions without disabling the customizable view settings.