I hate the new iTunes. Hatehatehatehatehate it.
- My favorite view is gone. I loved the old music view, which I had set up to show me both the album cover as well as the songs. Now, I have to choose between views, each of which have their own issues:
- Songs – Impossible to scan, because there’s no differentiation between albums. It’s just a laundry list of my music, which on my small iTunes library at work is 23,212 items as of this writing.
- Albums – This clearly wasn’t designed for someone who has a large library. It’s also difficult to scan for something. And yes, I do like scanning my library. Searching is fine, but sometimes i just want to scan.
- Artists and Genres – These are the closest to the old view that I loved, but there’s so much wasted space here that it drives me mad. I like whitespace, but they’ve crossed over from whitespace into wasted space. Also, of course, this is per-artist (or per-genre), which isn’t a complete view of my music collection.
- I clicked on “auto-size all columns” in the main songs view, which gave me columns that are all massive, and there’s no undo. Now I have to manually resize them. This is okay since I’ve got my laptop connected to a 24″ external monitor, and I put iTunes into fullscreen mode on it so that I could see more than one column (because apparently I’ve got some songs and albums with long titles), but is nearly impossible otherwise.
- The fonts are all wrong. I don’t know how the fonts got to be all wrong, but they are. The kerning is wrong, the weighting is wrong. I have no idea how you can make Helvetica look so horrible, and I assume that you have to work hard on doing so. This contributes to being difficult to read and difficult to scan. It’s especially noticeable when bold is used, which is in a surprisingly high number of places. I don’t hate Helvetica as much as some folks do, but something’s wrong with its use in iTunes.
- Tooltips are gone. Apparently they’ve forgotten one of Neilsen’s heuristics, recognition over recall. I have to recall what these buttons mean. I used to be able to recognize them and have the tooltip there at the ready to help me when I couldn’t recognize them. Looking at podcasts, for example, there’s four buttons immediately after the name of the podcast, and I had to click on two of them to see what they were. Or, let’s consider the gear icon, which is mostly used for settings, except in the sidebar, where it’s “export”. How can I recall what an icon means when it has multiple meanings?
- Buttons have lost their button-y look. In most places, this isn’t an issue. I don’t mind that the previous/play/next buttons in the main toolbar of the app are just icons and don’t have any kind of visual indication that they’re buttons. Those three buttons together have a lot of meaning on their own, I recognize them immediately, and I’m okay. However, in other places, it’s often difficult to tell what’s a button and what’s not. For example, those four buttons after the name of the podcast have insufficient whitespace to immediately identify that they’re buttons. Also, the play button out of context from its previous/next siblings just looks like an arrow (and that’s a glyph that I’ve seen in the names of songs and podcasts).
- … Except when they haven’t. There’s still a few buttons hanging around. There’s a nice bug “unsubscribe” button for podcasts, except it’s all in caps, just in case you weren’t aware that This Is A Button.
- The removal of the sidebar makes creating playlists a lot more difficult. If you don’t re-enable the sidebar, the only way to add a song to a playlist is via command-click. With the sidebar, you can just drag a song (or a group of songs) to the playlist on the left.
- In books, I’m now forced to care about the difference between “books” and “PDFs”. They’re both stuff that I want to read, and a lot of those PDFs are books. They might not be in a book-related file format like epub, but they’re still books in any way that I care about.
- Movies, TV shows, and podcasts have all added an “unwatched” (or “unplayed”, for podcasts) type. This is inconsistent with all other views, because it’s the only view where I’m now viewing a subset of the available content. Unwatched is now the default view, which makes this doubly annoying.
- Search is s l o w. I know I’ve got a big library and that I type fast, but I can click to the search box and type a whole song or artist name before a single character appears there. Since I can’t scan my library anymore, search is important, and it’s all but unresponsive.
UGH.
I could not agree more. Your point 1. is the one that gets on my nerves the most. I hate the fact that I can no longer get a proper view for the music anymore.
I would have settled with it had the new version eliminated a few bugs here and there (I’m lookingright at you WiFi sync from Hell), but that’s not even the case :-\
I try never to complain about a new UI until I’ve spent at least a week using it, in an attempt to distinguish genuine flaws from the intial, “Ugh, change is bad!” reaction. But your post is an excellent summary of why I’ve been tempted to break this policy for iTunes 11.
Tangentially related – isn’t it odd how many music apps tend to do a lousy job of catering to people with large music collections? I guess we’re outliers, but still…
I despise the new ITunes. I hate most of the stuff you’ve mentioned, but I really hate that it now displays stuff in the cloud inside with your normal music. I don’t want to see my daughter’s Justin Bieber crap, nor do I want to see the duplicate songs I have now that I bought a full version of certain albums on CD that were originally released as ITunes originals prior to world-wide release. I know its crazy, but sometimes I don’t want stuff that I’ve bought in ITunes anymore and will make an effort to download it manually if I want it after I’ve deleted it. Don’t automatically redownload it for me when I go to play the album I made from my CD.
I really wish I hadn’t upgraded because it’s just a POS.
TL: Go to View, “Hide {music, tv, whatever} in the cloud”
There is another way to add music to playlists – without command clicking.
Go to playlists in the the tab-strip-thing below the play buttons, choose a playlist (or make a new one), then choose “Add To…”, you then get a view like this which I like (because I can see the playlist contents while I’m deciding what to add)
Also Artists has an “All Artists” view. Not that does anything about wasted space.
Unwatched: I love this view. It’s great for people like me who have very large video libraries, and yes its a subset but… well yeah, that’s kind of the point. iTunes remembers what view I was on last though.
The only thing that bugs me about 11 is the mini-player not being the zoom button. Too many years of muscle memory means I continue to hit it, only to go “GAH” and have to hit it again.
i completely agree with everything you said. on top of all of that, there are SO many little things that have changed that completely ruined itune for me. top of the list is the deletion of the little “Genius” button that used to be in the bottom right corner. it took me hours to figure out what they had done with it.
itunes has always been one of my favourite features of my mac, but now its a struggle to use it. smarten up apple. stop over-complicating things for the sake of “simplicity”.
Here’s another reason to hate iTunes 11:
Podcast downloads now open in a new progress window, rather than just being a view on the sidebar. Why??!? How is a new window an improvement??!?!? Was this version user tested at ALL before release? Apple needs to go back to Nielsen’s useit.com basics. Grrrr. I’m reverting back to v.10.
The last I checked, Apple does not employ any user researchers, and I’m under the impression that they don’t dogfood in the same way that other Silicon Valley companies do.
Has anybody figured out where the app section has gone? I need to manage my apps, but i have no idea how to anymore -_-
If you’re referring to the navigation that used to be on the left side of the iTunes window (music, podcasts, apps, store, devices, playlists, etc), you can get it back. Go to the View menu and select “Show Sidebar”.
Ugh, you have helped me more than you could imagine. I have been scouring the internet to see how I could make iTunes look more like the classic. The sidebar is all I’ve been missing. In order to get songs into my iPhone I would have to select the iPhone and then find a translucent button called “add-to”. It was such an annoyance to the point where I was looking to see if there were any iTunes alternatives. There aren’t. I have no problem with them making changes, but I couldn’t function without a sidebar which I thought they had done away with. I guess it’s just the default setting. Now, it’s back and I feel so much better. Thank you very, very much.
I want to kick each person responsible for itunes 11 right in the face. It is a disaster in every way imaginable. If they are going to release garbage products like this, they should include a downgrade option.
Yeah, I sincerely wish that there was a way to go back to iTunes 10. It is possible, with sufficient work. The best method that I’ve seen so far is here, but you have to understand that “best method” is “the best of a lot of very sucky options”. :/
Can’t you just uninstall iTunes 11 and install iTunes 10.7, which you can download on Apple’s support page?
There’s more to it than just uninstalling iTunes 11. To do it properly and have it actually work (since iTunes 11 updates its database to a format that doesn’t work in iTunes 11, not to mention updates a bunch of frameworks), you have to go through more work than just dragging iTunes 11 to the trash, downloading the iTunes 10 DMG, and installing it.
Macworld UK has an article about how to downgrade iTunes 11 to iTunes 10. As you can see from the article, it’s a fairly lengthy process. But it might be what I end up doing.
I’ve arrived here hunting only to be able back away from v11.0.2. I had learned to get along — yes, I concur completely with the complaints here, and everywhere on the web — w iTunes11, but this new “up”grade is a disaster: it crashes when I try to bring music into my library, and it crashes when I enter a string in the search/filter window. The Unexpectedly quit message is getting nightmarish. Please point me at a procedure which simply allows me to get back to the initial v11.0.
Hmm, I haven’t had any issues with the most recent update like you’re describing, so I haven’t needed to fall back to a previous version. That said, since it’s a minor update, it’s possible that you might be able to restore the previous version via Time Machine. Have you given that a go yet?
i hate the new itunes cant do out on it it freezes all the time as well witch is really anoying
I, too, unwittingly upgraded to iTunes 11. As soon as I looked at the new screen, I froze in horror. Now I hardly ever play music because I just hate not knowing what I’m doing and having to spend 5 minutes to play a favorite song — if I’m lucky. It’s JUST NOT FUN like it used to be. I have other things to do in life, and trying to figure out how to to make one of my favorite apps work — because it doesn’t any more for me– I am questioning where Apple is going. Sorry, if I use it once a week or 2, I can’t remember the new stuff so I’m frustrated and hate it and just don’t use it.
I too hate the new itunes. I have been emailing and calling itunes since the 11 swich too over. I too have the issues that you have all mentioned, but I am dealing with a music library of over 170,000 songs. There is no way to index this many songs with the new itunes. I am having other issues as well, such as the fact that they have done away with the duplicate button, and if you try to change info on a song, it does not show up for a while. I am also having an issue with not getting my last played info or play counts to register. I have other issues as well such as the fact that my iphone won’t sync and various other issues. This is in my opinion the worst thing that apple has ever done!
Your library is what mine aspires to be when it grows up. I’m in the process of re-ripping all of my CDs, since my original ripping efforts were limited by disk space, so perhaps I’ll get there when this is all over.
I hate it too! The biggest problem I have is your #7. Without the sidebar, playlists just become a pain. I now have to change my view just to be able to select a playlist and THEN select the song I want? With classic iTunes, you only had to go down the sidebar.
I think with Steve Jobs gone Apple is losing its touch. The simple, clean efficiency of Jobs’ Apple products was really what set it aside from Microsoft. Apple nailed designs with its minimalist “less is more” approach, and it seems without Jobs around that vision is being forgotten. Now everything Apple comes out with seems to be taking a page out of Microsoft’s book, intentionally complicating simple layouts and tasks just to give it a more complex feel to it.
Nadyne, THANK YOU. I almost died using the default view settings. Also inadvertently found the menu bar at the same time. If anyone doesn’t have the menu bar, click the top left corner icon/button/thingy and hit show menu bar. File, Edit and all the other good stuff will magically reappear.
I re-installed iTunes 10 because I couldn’t stand iTunes 11. It was worth the trouble to have my familiar interface back. I needed to use Pacifist to manage it correctly and re-install all the appropriate files. Works like it used to. I had to set up all my playlists again because of the way I did things, but I kind of liked that process – made me look over my music again and I listened to some things I hadn’t heard in a while.
Just a thought – the drop in Apple stock since November 2012 may reflect the (investing) public sensing an unhealthy change in the company – typified by things like changes iTunes 11 and Preview without options to keep the features we like and miss.
Agreed…Apple ruined iTunes with this version 11. I liked the genius side bar, it introduced me to new music. Now I’ll just use Pandora. Common Apple, do you really need to keep changing the iTunes interface every 3 months (it seems). I’m over it…you’ve gone way beyond fun and created a nuisance. Steve died and so did the ‘genius’.
I agree whole heartedly with all being said. If you go to the apple support web site and look at the messages Am I the only one to hate I tunes 11, it is huge almost 2 gig of posts and nothing being done
There must be a way where apple will finally read all the messages. most articles just say apple is losing share prices but nobody bothers to dig any farther as to the why.
most of the posts I see, people say they are leaving apple.
I am in complete agreement with everyone else. I just updated to the new iTunes 11 and it is awful. It is completely counter intuitive and not user friendly at all. I’m going to go back to 10. It’s going to be annoying to do but I am sure worth the effort. What were they thinking?