how can I make itunes play a whole album?

2017 - December.

Purchased Eminem's album today. I can't figure out how to play an album from beginning to finish.

I have disabled all the shuffle stuff etc. As soon as I enter the mini-player which is huge there is no telling what is up next.

I'm a developer and program GPUs for a living and calculate billions of pixels per seconds and I can't figure out how to play an album from start to end in iTunes...

It is simpler for me to playback an album in the macOS Finder than in iTunes. This is not how I remember iTunes from back in the days where it was simple !

I wonder how less technical affine folks handle this ;-)

Yep . why can't I choose an album ... and play it in order with the touch of a button.

i.e. like turning on play on a cd player?

i.e. like dropping the needle on vinyl at the start of side a

I am trialling other streaming services .... maybe they have it sorted out.

I have to admit I agree with you. I still use iTunes 7 at home but I am using a newer computer with iTunes 11 right now while on vacation. I tried following instructions in another topic on this site but when I click on the arrow to the right of the album name it adds the first track to Up Next about 20x and just keeps on playing that first track. All tracks are checked. It's ironic that I have earned about 10,000 of my points on this site helping iTunes users and I can't get a new version of iTunes to simply play an album! I'm ready to call it quits but the problem is we are thinking of getting a newer computer at home and ultimately I will have to replace my iTunes 7 with a dreaded newer version which I am fast coming to detest.

After lookng at just about every menu item over the past hour or so I solved my problem. My host who is lacking somewhat on computer skills had engaged Controls > Repeat > One which was what was causing the first track of the album to be added to Up Next 20 times. I deactivated this and albums now play correctly. To do that, go to the album in the albums, artists, or genres tag and to the right you will see 3 icons, the first of which is a triangle on its side (arrow). Click that to play the album. It essentially adds all the album's tracks to Up Next.

I'm with you on this. I find the new behavior is iTunes 11 not as intuitive as it used to be. Limnos has got a correct answer. Another is to find the Album you want to play, right-click the album cover and choose either "play" or "shuffle."

make sure the blue icon don't look like this click it until it's not blue.

Mr. Jobs would not be impressed. Since he moved on, things seem to be becoming a bit too complicated.

No, clicking on the triangular button next to the album does absolutely nothing! I am really beginning to despise iTunes v.12. It seems each new update makes it harder to understand. It's becoming increasingly NON user friendly. The interface and everything about it is more complicated. What's happening to you Apple?

I right click the album cover, a sub menu pops up with "play" being the first option, I click on it, and...nothing. Nothing happens. This is so frustrating! Why does Apple make it so difficult to just play a **** album??

Same here. iTunes version 12 on a MacBook Pro, everything at the latest version. In album view, if I click the Play triangle, or right-click the album and select Play, nothing happens. If I double click an individual song it plays, but doesn’t go on to play the rest of the album. Also right-clicking the album and selecting “Add to Up Next” does nothing. What does work for me is selecting all the songs, right-clicking and selecting “Add to Up Next”. Though even then it’s awkward, since it seems you need to play something else first, and then skip it to get it to start playing the Up Next list. Very surprising Apple would screw something so basic up.

Ok, I just found a solution in another thread. You need to go to Preferences > General, and uncheck the "Show list checkboxes" option. Then playing albums works as expected. Pretty unintuitive, but at least there's a fix.

I do get the logic behind this, but still think it's a mistake, for a few reasons. The idea is that if you have the checkboxes feature turned on, then you use checkboxes to make iTunes ignore unchecked songs unless you explicitly ask to play them. So clicking play on an album with no checked songs doesn't do anything. There are a few problems with this though.

1. First of all, if Apple is going to turn this option on by default, then they should also make it so all songs are checked by default. As it is, at least using iTunes Match, all songs are unchecked by default, which means we get this wacky behavior.
2. Second, in Albums view you can't see the checkboxes even when the option is enabled. Since Albums view is the default view now, it's unlikely a user would even accidentally stumble on the solution of checking the songs, since they don't see any checkboxes.
3. Third, the option is mis-labeled, since it does more than just make the checkboxes visible or not, it also changes whether they get used or not. It should probably be called "Use checkboxes" or something like that, to indicate that it's not just changing whether you see them, but also whether they get used to control what gets played.

you Sir are a genius.... 🙂

Biker, you hit the nail on the head. This idea of Apple products being so intuitive that they need no instruction manual may have been true years ago, but as of the last few years, it's an urban myth. Itunes is a perfect example of of a product that evidences no usability testing employing actual users. For years, I have been a part of teams that developed applications at HP, and believe me, not only is product testing supremely important, coders do NOT design the user interfaces. Like this issue, commonly used features are buried under layers of menus and hidden by arcane names. I consider myself pretty tech savvy, but iTunes is one of those products that has driven me to forums more times than I care to count.