Let’s take a look at some key features of using your music library to see where Apple’s gone off the rails with this update.

Things people do on the regular, like importing CDs (although this must be a passé ritual since new Macs no longer shop with optical drives); managing your iTunes library and file storage; viewing and finding your music. By no means a definitive list, but an embarrassingly long one, nonetheless.

Importing

Here are four wonderful iTunes 11 design decisions which slow down the importing process:

1. Previously when importing, you could just pop the CD in and set it to auto-import. No more. You have to click the Import button. Every time.

2. This would perhaps not be so bad if you could just hit the Import button, but not even this is a one-step process. With iTunes 11, a dialog comes up to confirm the import settings. Who changes import settings with every import? This is a completely unnecessary extra window and click in the now doubly tedious import process.

3. If you are comparing an existing import to a CD (for example, I’m currently trying to upgrade a bunch of 2003 iTunes 128k imports to 320k imports) you used to be able to go the album, take a look at the bit rate, compare track names, edit the CD track names, import, and jump back to your library to double-check all the songs were replaced and no duplicates imported.

Now, the default view for iTunes is album view which doesn’t show you the bit rate or genre, so you have to switch to another view (Songs, Playlists, etc) to confirm bit rate and genre (along with track name, artist, year, and album name), then change to the CD view, update the details there to match, and import.

This is a multi-step process because there is no way to see both the CD view and existing album view at the same time. And to make this an even more tedious process, when you switch back to the music library from the CD view, you are greeted with a default Album view. In other words, not only are you not in the view you were last in, but even in Album view, the album you were last looking at is not selected, so you have to search for the album you’re importing once again. So, so tedious.

4. Making this even more of a nightmare to manage, it appears that with iTunes 11, even when files are reconciled in iTunes and the 128k file now shows as 320k in your music library, both the 128k and 320k file are saved to your hard drive. So now you have a duplicate of every file on your computer, though you’d never know if you didn’t look at your hard drive.

In every previous version of iTunes, reimporting would delete the older file, keeping only the new one.

Now, you could argue this isn’t that big of a deal. Why not just delete the crappy 128k version and import the new CD all over as 320k. The trouble here is, this gets rid of play counts, ratings, and removes the songs from any playlists they were ever manually added to. For someone who has smart playlists set up and is fanatical about putting songs into playlists to keep them organized, this is even more of a nightmare than dealing with duplicate 128k files on a hard drive.

In any case, you’re left with the following import options with iTunes 11:

1. Destroy all your smart playlists by deleting lower bit rate imports and reimporting your CDs at your desired higher bit rate.
2. Import your CDs overwriting previous imports and use Finder to delete all the duplicate lower bitrate files manually.
3. Suck it up and keep listening to poor quality files from 2003.

Managing Files

This past week’s update to iTunes 11.0.1 brings the duplicate files view back. Alas, this ‘feature’ continues to be useless. More on that and a couple of other tedious file management issues.

1. iTunes still makes no effort to discern the difference between the same song on a different album vs the same song on the same album with the same or slightly different criteria. (ie, a true duplicate and/or a file with a different duration or bit rate that’s off the same album, and so on. For that, you’ll need to ask Doug for some help.

2. Missing files are still referenced only within the play order column, so there’s no way to sort your library by missing files and deal with them directly. And I swear around iTunes 10.4 or so you could select one missing file and match it and iTunes would attempt to match all the other missing files based on the same file structure. But, that certainly has not been the case for many years, so you’re left dealing with missing files one at a time. If you can even find them.

3. Renaming an artist, genre, album, or otherwise, causes any search or list to be reset to  once that item disappears from the list. I suspect this is an issue with everything being stored in a single XML file, but that just points to the fact that iTunes 11 uses the same sorry guts of every previous iTunes. ie, it’s 10 years old and is sorely in need of being rewritten to improve performance, if nothing else.

In fact, renaming a song in a list jumps that song to the top of your list (even if you’re sorted by album. This new and unnecessary behaviour is confusing. Your list shouldn’t be jumping around at all. Ever.

Views

Then there are new limited view options which make navigating your library more cumbersome than ever.

1. Multiple windows, for one, are gone. If I could open the CD I’m importing in a separate window, I could avoid the reset of the Music library view (described above) when I’m comparing an import to a CD.

2. And while making playlists by dragging to the right has it’s benefits when you’re just noodling around, there are three major issues with this interaction:

i. it only works in certain views. If you’re in Playlist view or have the Sidebar open, for example, dragging left inexplicable does nothing.

ii. if you’re trying to create a Playlist from multiple locations in your library (ie, doing a lot of jumping around or searching to build a playlist for, say, a house party, or wedding, or to romance someone, it’s far, far easier to open this in a separate window and drag and drop, which leads to the final point about creating manual Playlists;

iii. with a separate Playlist window, you’re able to drag and drop in the order you want. ie, you can put a song between track 3 and 4. With the sidebar option, you’re just dumping a bunch of songs in a list and you have to go that Playlist later to order them. Again, this is unnecessarily tedious.

To be fair, iTunes does offer a new Edit Playlist view which anchors the playlist on the right hand side of iTunes and switches the main view to song view so you can move any song into the Playlist. But this hides all other Playlists, so if you want to drag from any one playlist to another, your only option is to turn on the sidebar and move one song at a time because, of course, if you show the sidebar, Edit Playlist no longer works, and vice versa.

Just another mindless inconsistency that makes getting used to these new, limiting features, a nightmare.

3. Back to general views, we now have a dropdown view selector with List, Artist, and Album view.

And within Artists view you get this hybrid list view with album art, but no standard album view.

Meanwhile, with all the effort to make the library more artwork friendly, there’s an odd-ommission: the removal of a Cover Flow view means any single artist track playlists (best ofs, compilations I’ve made, etc) now has no artwork. Previously, I’d flip on Cover Flow so as we moved from track to track the artwork for that song would show. Now there’s only plain old list view, or Artist view, which shows massive gaps between each individual song.

And we have the command B viewer

And, as a quick aside, what’s with the scrollbars in iTunes 11?

4. And now we have 4 different play/pause buttons and 4 different shuffle buttons (which seem to offer completely different and sometimes annoyingly unclear shuffle options. Here’s the rundown:

i. The Shuffle toggle in the header allows to turn on or off shuffling of the currently playing song, retaining whatever your last shuffle settings were.

ii. The Shuffle toggle in a Playlist shuffles the entire playlist, restarting the playlist with a random track, even if you were listening to a track in the playlist.

iii. The Shuffle toggle in a Playlist that sits beside an artist name shuffles all tracks by an Artist across your entire library, not just in the Playlist you were listening to.

iv. The Shuffle toggle beside an Album name shuffles only songs in the album. ie, if there’s one track in an album and you hit this Shuffle button, you hear one track and that’s it.

In other words, there doesn’t appear to be any way to shuffle a variety of songs from a currently playing track. Well, unless you hit the arrow when you hover over the track name and select ‘Start Genius’; that’ll shuffle the song in with others, of course. Well, if Genius has any suggestions for that song.

Finding Music

1. Speaking of that arrow that’s revealed when you hover over a track name. There’s all sorts of good stuff in there. Sometimes.

5. Default search searches across all of iTunes, not just Music. This is important if you’re using a large library as it will freeze iTunes for several minutes, if not for good. This is said to be improved with iTunes 11.0.1 but I thankfully found you can change the default search to avoid this cross-iTunes music/app/book search (who would ever need that?!)

Tagging Music

There are a few improvements, quick access to making folders, for instance.

Rating is two steps in the mini player, and oddly, they’ve removed the stars from the doc rating view and replaced this with numbers 1 through 5.

The ‘cut’ command no longer works if you try to cut the last name of multi-name artist. That has to be a bug.

Genius

In fact, this update is so clearly a disaster that there’s a disconnect between the actual shipping product and the marketing screens on Apple’s website.

Every view of songs in the iTunes library on the iTunes Player section of the Apple site shows the sidebar open even though it’s closed by default. No doubt this is because it’s just about  the only way to find Genius Playlists. The caveat being that if you select the Playlists view you can now see Genius Mixes and your latest genius mix at the top of the Playlists column. But this was clearly a last ditch effort to get Genius Mixes back into the new design as the What’s New in iTunes video does not show these at all. I can just see the meeting now where someone said, “Where can I find Genius Playlists?” And after a few futile clicks they delay the release a month.

And all of this without rearchitecting the app at all so it doesn’t rely on an extremely slow flat file database. At least if there were some performance improvements, we could enjoy those while we wait for the nightmarishly cumbersome and inconsistent design issues to  be addressed with subsequent updates.

Alas, all I’m left hoping for now is that they quickly address the inconsistencies in behaviour across different views and the file management issues before I run out of patience and attempt a downgrade to 10.7. In the meantime, I’ll try to focus my time on enjoying the Mini Player and trying to find some excuse to use the album view as those are, as far as your music is concerned, about the only discernible improvements over iTunes 10.7.

The post The very, very poorly designed iTunes 11 appeared first on Say Yeah!.

More importantly, apart from the multiple icons, we find within this dropdown unnecessary complication. Here’s a riveting minute and a half shaky iPhone video showing how these added interactions unnecessarily complicate the use of the app while adding to the development time.

The simple rule being: simplify, especially for the end user.

The post A brief video on simplifying your user interface. appeared first on Say Yeah!.

I’ve just submitted my second report to Apple on the UI issues that have dogged iTunes 10. (The previous report offering some suggestions regarding the new album art player view and noting several issues including the broken compilation browsing by album which is fixed in iTunes 10.0.1.)

This latest issue, introduced with iTunes 10.0.1, has been the cause of much grief over the past few days. With the update, iTunes removed the little arrows within each column that allowed you to quickly link to all tracks by an artist or all album tracks.

An arrow free iTunes 10.0.1:

These arrows were originally designed to quickly link to an artist or an album within the iTunes store, but there was also the ability to option-click on these links to browse to an artist or album within your library. Better yet, there was a nice little terminal hack which made this the default action. This made linking to full album or all tracks from an artist when you were shuffling or listening to a mixed playlist so simple.

But with the introduction of the the Ping sidebar and Ping button in the track name column, the iTunes team clearly thought these arrows links were no longer of value. They could not be more wrong.

Ping friendly iTunes 10.0.1:

Several times in the past few days I’ve struggled with trying find all the tracks from a compilation, or seeing what else I have from an artists while I’ve been listening to a random playlist. They’ve turned a one click action into a torturous two strep process, as you now have to move from the playlist to your library and either scroll the artist/album column and select what you’re looking for (not to mention the album browsing column isn’t even turned on by default anymore) or perform a search, which can bring up all manner of similar search results, rather than just isolating the artist.

Thankfully, there’s a new terminal hack to turn these arrows back on, but man, they need to be on by default. This is such a time saver, it’s a function all users should have access to by default.

Run this in terminal:
defaults write com.apple.iTunes show-store-link-arrows -bool TRUE

See lovely quick link arrows:

Of course, having an arrow beside the track name has never made any sense, since this doesn’t actually search the track name (it searches the album name). The solution here is for iTunes to simply show this arrow beside Artist Name (to search by artist), Album Name (to search by album) and perhaps Composer (to search by composer) and leave Ping alone beside the track name. This keeps the links in context, removes unneeded clutter from the track name, let’s you quickly Ping and browse your library.

I also just noticed there are arrows beside genres, which I’ve never used, but certainly see the value to. The one thing I’ve never been able to sort out is, why can’t I browse by year? No arrows there. Just have to make dozens of smart playlists, which is no fun. But I’ll harass them about that another time.

The post iTunes 10: making browsing as painful as possible. appeared first on Say Yeah!.

There are a lot of UX and aesthetic gripes that you could point out when discussing iTunes. A few items solved with iTunes 10 and a number of new ones introduced, but let’s focus on a nice little touch relating to iTunes player views.

Previous to iTunes 10, you had two window states that allowed you to control the music that was playing. There was the full window (with various options on how you displayed your tracks and albums (song list, album list, grid, or cover flow). Here’s how that window looks:

Big and expansive, it provides you with access to all the functionality and information regarding your library, but if you’re not browsing your library, it takes up a ton of desktop realty and can also take up substantial amounts of RAM when it’s in full view. Minimizing this window (by hitting the yellow button, top left) saved your RAM, but meant you were stuck with keyboard keys and context clicking on the dock icon to pause, forward, or rate the track you were playing.

Which brings us to the second option, the mini iTunes window. You can toggle between the full view above and the mini window by hitting the green button, top left. And the mini window looks like this:

I’ve personally never liked this window. It doesn’t really offer any additional control over the keyboard keys and your view of the music and feels too sterile on my desktop.

So, what else is there? Well, in previous versions of iTunes you could of course see your album artwork in the full window and, should you choose to do so, you can click on it for a larger view, which looks like this:

Not much to this window, other than enlarged artwork, which you can close, minimize, or expand to take up the full height of your desktop. However, in iTunes 10, enlarging up the artwork from a song you’re currently playing now looks like this:

A little cleaner album view without the title bar on the top. But the best part about this is when you rollover it:

Now in the same style as Quicktime X, rolling over what you’re actively playing gives you access to not just the title bar, but a full set of controls. Better yet, this window shows whatever song is currently playing, not just a song from the album you originally clicked on. This means, as the song changes and as you move from one album to the other, this artwork will reflect the current track and its artwork, and these controls.

So now you can leave this artwork window open on your desktop, close the main window to save space and RAM, all while retaining the same controls as the mini view in a much nicer artwork view.

So what’s missing

Unfortunately, the album player window is not persistent. If you close iTunes and reopen, only the main iTunes window will load.

Part of not being persistent means there’s no quick link in the Window menu. While the main iTunes window and mini-player are both identified as “iTunes” in the Window menu, the album player is only identified when it’s already open. This means the only way to open the album player is to click on the artwork of a playing song from the artwork view in the Library browsing column on the left of iTunes. Personally, with the album artwork now sitting right next to the track listings in the main iTunes window, I hardly ever turn on the artwork view in the Library browsing column, so it’s not a simple process to get the album player up when it keeps closing.

Library column artwork on the left and artwork right next to the track listings seems redundant, and closing the larger view on the left means you can see more of your playlists:

Finally, on the control overlays over the album art itself, there’s plenty of room over the time remaining to drop in shuffle, repeat, and genius controls, which would round out the functionality of this mini-player.

So far this new player view is a really nice addition to iTunes, and cleaning up these few items will help make sure it gets regular use. Now it’s just too bad this James album isn’t half as interesting as its cover.

The post Pretty little subtleties: iTunes player views. appeared first on Say Yeah!.