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iTunes 11 organization question (HELP!)

I recently upgraded to iTunes 11 and I feel like I made a big mistake. It feels like all of the work I have put into organizing my music in previous versions has been undone.


However, I am trying to keep an open mind and see if I can learn what I need to do to get back to where I was with my music organization.


First, I will say that I probably have a lot of unconventional music and use it in an unconventional manner. A huge chunk of my music is used for tabletop RPG gaming, where I play music that is appropriate to whatever is happening in the game. For example, one of my Genres is "Combat" and another is "Background". Both Genres have "Artists" called "Video Games", which contain music taken from various video games I have owned (further sorted by "Album" further down the heirarchy). A LOT of this music was either never part of a conventional album or has since been renamed by myself to better suit what I am using it for.


Rather than getting into what iTunes has done to how my music is displayed on my iPhone, let me explain what I want out of iTunes and see if someone can help me use iTunes 11 to get there.


I want to set up iTunes 11 so that on my iPhone I can go to "Music", select "Genres", select a genre, and have it display Artists IN THAT GENRE *ONLY* in alphabetical order. Then I want to be able to select one of the Artists and have my iPhone display ONLY the Albums BY THAT ARTIST, IN THAT GENRE, in alphabetical order. I do NOT want to see Albums by that Artist that are in another Genre, for example.


I want to see the Album titles ONLY, *NOT* each Album displayed as some kind of header followed by every song that Album contains. I want to have to click on an Album in order to see all of the music it contains.


Finally, I want my iPhone to stop playing music once the last song from an Album has been played, NOT skip ahead to the next Album and start playing music from it.



Right now, if I go to "Music" on my iPhone, and choose to view Genres, it displays them all well enough and in alphabetical order. Once I select a Genre, however, things go wonky. Say I select "Background" -- it will display a list of Artists in seemingly random order, many of which are repeated one or more times. Many of these Artists (such as "Video Games") have a different Genre than the one I selected, but do have the same name as an Artist in the Genre I DID select.


iTunes 11 SEEMS to be trying to display EVERY instance of EVERY Artist saved in the iTunes library, even if it that instance isn't part of the Genre I selected. This is not what I want.


Any advice?

iPhone 5, Windows Vista

Posted on Jan 19, 2014 9:32 AM

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Posted on Jan 19, 2014 10:24 AM

The main differences between iTunes 11 and earlier versions are the loss of coverflow and ability to have multiple windows open.


In Windows, you can restore much of the look & feel of iTunes 10.7 with these shortcuts:

  • ALT to temporarily display the menu bar
  • CTRL+B to show or hide the menu bar
  • CTRL+S to show or hide the sidebar
  • CTRL+/ to show or hide the status bar (won't hide for me on Win XP)
  • Click the magnifying glass top right and untick Search Entire Library to restore the old search behaviour
  • Use View > Hide <Media Kind> in the cloud or Edit > Preferences > Store and untick Show iTunes in the cloud purchases to hide the cloud items. The second method eliminates the cloud status column (and may let iTunes start up more quickly)
  • If you don't like having different coloured background & text in the Album (Grid) view use Edit > Preferences > General and untick Use custom colours for open albums, movies, etc.
  • With iTunes 11.0.3 and later you can enable artwork in the Songs view from View > Show View Options (CTRL+J) making it more like the old Album List view
  • View > Show View Options (CTRL+J) also contains options to change the sorting of grid based views


iTunes doesn't provide any customization over and above what is already there, though some of the existing options are well hidden. Explore them thoroughly and you should be able to find something useful.


tt2

18 replies

Jan 20, 2014 5:18 PM in response to Werebat

Changes you make in iTunes, or indeed which version of it you have installed, cannot affect the designed behaviour of the software on the iPhone. Once that design is understood you may be able to choose a scheme for your metadata that works better with it. If another app suits you better than the iPhone's built-in music app (which changed in iOS7 but not in ways that I can detail) then all to the good. Enjoy the music. 🙂


tt2

Jan 20, 2014 7:27 PM in response to turingtest2

Thanks, TT2. I do appreciate the help, and you DID help me greatly in figuring out how to do the necessary reconfigurations I needed to do to get my music accessible in the way I want it to be. For that I am going to say you "solved my question"; by my estimation it isn't your fault that iTunes 11 is impossible to configure the way I want.


As an update to my previous entry here, for those others who may be reading this, I found an app that is, in my opinion, better than Picky. It's called Lagu and with a little work in iTunes I was able to get things to a point where I think all of my problems are solved. Lagu basically resembles an older iTunes and presents everything the way I want it presented; it also kept all my old playlists. It's only $1.99!


As for iTunes 11, I will continue to use it to organize my music (and thanks again to TT2 for helping me learn how to do that), but I won't be using it to play anything on my iPhone.


As for Apple, thanks for nothing. You wasted a lot of my time.

iTunes 11 organization question (HELP!)

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