ten more reasons I hate iTunes 11

I’ve already given you ten reasons that I hate iTunes 11, but now that I’ve been using it for awhile, I’ve got ten more.

  1. The Artists view doesn’t show all of the artists that are in my library.  I have an artist where I have several hundred songs, and yet they’re not in the artist view.  All of the songs are tagged appropriately, and they live in the same folder as all of the rest of my music, but somehow this artist isn’t worthy of the Artists view.  
  2. Navigational behavior is inconsistent between views.  Here are some examples:
    1. If you open up the information for a song in the Artists view, you don’t get Previous and Next buttons (and their attendant keyboard shortcuts).  If you open up that same song in the Songs view, you do.  Both of these are lists of songs, why do I get buttons in one place and not in another?
    2. If you delete a song (which I’m doing a lot of, because the move to iTunes 11 has duplicated a bunch of songs) in the Artists view, you lose focus and have to click with your mouse again to get focus somewhere.  In the Songs view, if you delete a song, focus moves to the next song.  Why is this inconsistent?
  3. I keep on accidentally hitting the menu arrow next to songs, because it seems that its click target is a lot bigger than the button is, and it’s not in a consistent location.  For example, if I’m trying to shift-click to select several songs, I often accidentally hit that stupid menu arrow for one of the songs.  It interrupts my workflow.
  4. There is bloody well nothing on that menu arrow that I use, so it’s especially obnoxious that I keep on hitting it when I don’t care about it.
  5. I really miss iTunes DJ.  I used it all the time to just randomly shuffle through my complete library.  It let me rearrange the songs that were coming up, and I could remove things that I wasn’t in the mood for.  “Up Next” is not nearly as useful, especially since I can only see a scant handful of songs that it’s going to play next.  iTunes DJ is also the only place in iTunes where I actually liked Cover Flow.  (I mostly don’t mind the loss of Cover Flow, but I do here.)
  6. File > Display Duplicates is gone.  When you’ve got a library as large as mine, this feature made it a lot easier to identify duplicates, determine which one you wanted to keep, and delete the rest.
  7. Gapless albums are gone.  This was awesome for live albums, as well as albums where the tracks flow seamlessly from one to another (the canonical example here is probably Dark Side of the Moon).  This function keeps iTunes from cross-fading songs on gapless albums.  Now listening to live albums is annoying, and Dark Side is all but unlistenable.
  8. Search doesn’t always take you anywhere useful.  I like the drop-down that appears in search, but if you’re in the Artists view (which is the only view that I find even remotely palatable), searching just takes you to the artist where the album or song that you searched for is contained.  This is utterly useless if you have a lot of songs by an artist.
  9. It doesn’t remember where you last were if you change views.  Let’s say you had a song selected in the Artists view, and then you go to the Podcasts view.  Go back to Artists, and you’re back at the top of the Artists view.
  10. There are default settings for podcasts that I apparently can’t manipulate.  They’re not in the Preferences, they’re not anywhere on the odcasts page that I’ve noticed.  But every podcast has a little settings icon, and there’s a “use default settings” checkbox there.  I would like for the default to be that it downloads all available episodes, not just the most recent one.  I can’t do that, so I have to go to each and every podcast, click its settings, and change that value.  Why have default podcast settings if I can’t access them?

I’ve been using iTunes 11 a lot in the hopes that I could come to some kind of peace with it, but I still hate it every single time I touch it.

2 thoughts on “ten more reasons I hate iTunes 11”

  1. File > Display Duplicates is now View > Show Duplicate Items. It did disappear in 11.0 but they brought it back in 11.0.1.

    I don’t miss iTunes DJ (I always wanted to use it, but needing to go into it as a mode first meant I pretty much never did), and do use Up Next a lot. Main thing that bugs me with that is when I spend a while crafting a perfect set of songs to come up next and then accidentally click on something in the main UI and it loses it all.

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