Apple’s New iTunes 9: Good and Bad
I hope to write a bit about the nice new features in iTunes 9 very soon – home sharing, app organization, and more – but first a few brief words about the not-so-good. Most of my problems so far are related, directly or indirectly, to the iTunes Store. When browsing last night, after installing iTunes 9, iTunes crashed about a half-dozen times, each time when I was clicking a link or selecting a different section of the store from the drop-down menus at the top of the window. This is the least stable version of iTunes I can remember, at least for me. I read occasionally about people who have problems with iTunes stability, but this is often related to plug-ins. For me, however, these problems were simply in the use of the iTunes Store itself.
Apple is using its WebKit framework for rendering iTunes Store pages, now, and it looks as though there’s some incompatibility between WebKit and iTunes. I haven’t browsed the usual forums to see if others are having this problem, but I’ll look into it.
Beyond the stability problem, the new iTunes store is ugly and unusable. Apple has scrunched everything together, so you cannot read the names of albums unless they are very short:
Even when you click an album to get a pop-up with info, the album name is truncated far too much, as are the names of “songs”:
Granted, this latter view works with most pop, rock and jazz albums, but is abysmal with classical music.
The overall look of the iTunes Store now is one of “trying to fit too much in a limited space,” whereas in the previous incarnation I just had the feeling that I didn’t see very much stuff. Apple needs to find a middle ground between the two.
Stay tuned for more coverage of the new features in iTunes 9.
Posted: 9/10/2009 by kirk | Filed under: iPod & iTunes | 16 Comments »
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I’ve had no stability problems so far, but I agree the item info in the store is too cramped…”ugly and unusable” is not an exaggeration.
The other issue I have is sorting my collection in the browser. In iTunes 8 I could click on the “album by artist” column and all the albums were sorted by artist, and secondarily by album name. In iTunes, the same column sorts by artist, and secondarily by track number. So a ten CD set is now listed as 10 track 1′s, followed by 10 track 2′s, etc. To get around this you can click on the “artist” column, but the listing then adds all single songs from compilations (even if you have “group compilations when browsing” checked). It’s kind of a pain to view this way for someone who has thousands of songs in compilations…particularly if you have artwork showing, as each song takes up an inch or two of screen space to fit the cover art. Maybe I’m just missing something, but I can’t my collection to sort and display in a satisfactory way anymore.
There are some nice little touches in 9, like half listened to podcasts getting a half blue dot instead of no dot, but I can’t figure out if this change to the sorting is supposed to be a change for the better or if it’s just a bug
Huh, I hadn’t noticed that sort problem. That’s annoying. I generally keep my stuff sorted by “Album by artist”. The only thing I can see is to use Doug Adam’s Albumize selection AppleScript (if you use a Mac), to renumber the tracks.
You’re clicking on the (i) icon which gives the popup view. Click on the album icon itself and you go to a page with a sensible layout.
Yes, I know you can get a page as well; that popup view is much quicker though, and is practical.
So far I have found the new itunes to be incredibly buggy and I dont understand how Apple can release a program which so many people depend on and which is manifestly just not ready.
So far I have found the program unstable in that it crashed many times before I followed a suggestion from the Apple support groups and deleted windows live sync.
I then reinstalled I tunes. I find it is very unstable with a brand new ipod nano. Its fine so long as I dont attempt to open any tab other than music. It also seemed to be miscalculating the space required by various play lists for syncing.
It also has had various problems when I attach an ipod touch.
Surely some of this type of problem and the many common problems being listed on Apples own web site would have shown up with even a degree of basic testing??
Apple seem to be oblivious to the hours and hours they waste on people with the release of this type of ill prepared program.
I have found two of the more annoying feature changes which are a pain.
1. Why did they change the green button to a window resize button away from the mini player, its now just like the windows version which I never understood why they made it that way in the start on windows versions, not another quick key to remember….
2. dragging content from the finder into a playlist feature has gone, this was a very handy feature to pre-sort mp3 files without them being lost into the main library, now you can only drag from the main library to the playlist…. a backwards step if I ever saw one.
Well, the green button: all they did was rationalize the usage of that button, which, in every other program, does what it does in iTunes.
Dragging files from the Finder to a playlist works fine for me. I do that with, say, files downloaded from eMusic.
9.01 The people have spoken, apple have listened, and the green zoom button is back, and low and behold the updaye fixed my adding to play lists from the finder issue, big smile here!!!!
Well, as I said above, I disagree with the green button thing. But they did fix the sort order for multi-disc albums, and a handful of other bugs. We’ll see if it’s stable; I had tons of crashes with it, the first version that’s ever been so unstable for me.
I always download the free songs but now I have to upgrade to version 9 to get it. So disappointed. After reading this post I guess it’s not worth the free songs.
I installed iTunes 9 (9.0.3) and now music video previews will NOT play. Video window opens as if it’s about to play, but screen is dark, sometimes audio only will play..but not consistently. I don’t know if this is now an incompatibility issue between iTunes 9 and my 4 year-old Dell desktop, or if it’s truly just an aggravating iTunes 9 bug. Driving me crazy. I wish I had stayed at iTunes 8. At least it worked there. Anybody experiencing same issue? Any know resolutio? Thanks!
My only suggestion would be to reinstall QuickTime, which is what is used for displaying the video.
Thanks. I reinstalled and still have the same problem (de-installed alltogether, and downloaded again from apple.com and reinstalled). It was worth a shot. Thanks again…
Hi, i installed itunes 9, and noticed that the number of artists dropped significntly. This i presume is because it is now ‘grouping compilations.’
How do i reverse this?
Ive tried going to preferences > general – but i cannot see anything to untick grouping?
Thanks. Brett.
That’d be in View > Column Browser.
Thanks Kirk.