[natmusak]

I didn't much care for Grid view...'til I discovered the Group Artists option! I don't have iPhoto '08, so I've never gotten to browse things this way. It's soooo much faster and useful than List view, in my opinion.
The only complaint I have is shuffling. In List view, List view w/ Album Art, and CoverFlow, all songs from all artists and all albums are shuffled. That's good. In Grid view, however, regardless of whether it's set to shuffle by songs, albums, or groupings, it only shuffles the first artist's songs and then stops. It doesn't go to other songs by other artists.
And on that note, just curious, does anyone know why there's never been an option to shuffle by artist? Be nice to not hear the same artist twice until all artists have had at least one song played.

[griffman]

Thanks for the fix, brandon95030! That was the problem on my end, too -- despite claiming to be downloading the HD versions, I got the SD versions. I'm editing the article to note both the problem and the solution, and to reflect the proper size measurements for the HD shows.

Sorry for the error, but I couldn't figure out what I was doing wrong ... not looking for an iTunes bug turns out to be the answer :).

-rob.

[mdawson]

One of the first things I do in a new version of iTunes is deactivate any links to the iTunes Store. I do not download music, legally or otherwise, and I do not need the software throwing the store in my face. I do find the iTunes Store (somewhat) useful when I am in clued into a song or hear something that I have not heard in a while, but the link in the source list is more than enough to serve that end.

Besides, why on earth would anyone need or want a link to the store for music they already have? I have seen many a person?s iTunes library and I cannot recall a single instance where people knowingly left the link to the iTunes Store active; those that did failed to learn how to turn it off.

[mdawson]

Naw, a Deadhead?s musical tastes cannot be ?very odd.? :p ;)

[Kyle_Varnell]

Here's another annoyance I'm finding with iTunes 8.0 that I'm wondering if anyone else is having. Whenever I play a video and I have it in a smaller window to continue doing work while watching I notice that the color of the border changes from the usual grey to a milky white. It does this for whatever window is not currently "Active" in iTunes. I find this to be pretty annoying personally and I don't recall it ever being like this before. A minor annoyance I know but still....

[macavenger]

mdawson said:

Besides, why on earth would anyone need or want a link to the store for music they already have? I have seen many a person?s iTunes library and I cannot recall a single instance where people knowingly left the link to the iTunes Store active; those that did failed to learn how to turn it off.

That's because you've never seen my library. I know perfectly well how to turn off the links, both in 7 and 8, but I've never bothered. Why should I? It's not like they are obtrusive or in-my-face or anything. Most of the time I never even notice them, but they are there when I want them.

As to why you would want a link to the store for music you have: it can come in handy when you have one or two songs from an album, and are interested in completing the album (probably not an issue if you never download anything, but I would venture to say most people do), or even when you have all the songs from an album, but are interested in finding more music from the same artist. Just click the link, and you are taken directly to the artist/album page, no searching needed. There are probably other reasons, but this one jumped to mind, as it is one I have used on a number of occasions.

[holzwege]

Genius does a poor job with classical music. I get some suggested playlists,but most come up with nothing. This is for mainstream composers (Bach, Beethoven), not Cats and dogs Avant Garde composers like Varèse or Boulez, to say nothing of Des Prez.
It would be better if iTunes realized that movements of symphonies (etc.) were just part of larger works. Not much good to pair the second movement of a symphony with the fugue of a prelude and fugue.
And why is everything 'songs'? I have very few songs -- Kindertotenleider, for example, but lots of sonatas, preludes, Inventions, symphonies, etc. None of these are 'songs'. I wish there was an option to call the tracks 'compositions', or even 'tracks'.

[macavenger]

mdawson said:

Hopefully when Macworld does their full review of iTunes 8 they will discuss whether or not Apple has addressed organized iTunes Music folders in conjunction with the sorting features added in iTunes 7. Since the introduction of the Album Artist and sorting fields in the previous version, iTunes should not be continuing to default to the Artist field to name artist folders when the newer fields are utilized. The naming of those folders should be based on the following priorities:
bq. 1. Sort Album Artist 2. Album Artist 3. Sort Artist 4. Artist
and it is not as if it would take any real effort for Apple to implement that functionality. Otherwise the ?Keep iTunes Music folder organized? option is of no real use.

To you perhaps :) For me though, I couldn't care less how they name the folders- I never (ok, very verry rarely) look at them. To me (and, I'm sure, many others-I'm not THAT unique :-D ), that is the whole point of the "Keep iTunes Music folder organized" feature. It allows me to rip new CD's, download music, convert formats, burn cd's, copy songs to flash drives or whatever without ever having to actually deal with the file structure. I can just do everything I want to with the files through iTunes, and let it keep my music folder organized, without any care for HOW it is doing that. Now this is just me, of course. I'm sure you have completely valid reasons for caring about the actual folder structure on disk, though if I don't know them, and I'm sure there are many others as well. It's just that making the global statement that the feature is of no real use is a bit too broad :)

[mdawson]

Quote

natmusak wrote:

>

Quote

And on that note, just curious, does anyone know why there's never been an option to shuffle by artist? Be nice to not hear the same artist twice until all artists have had at least one song played.

The closest iTunes comes to sorting by artist is the Smart Shuffle playback preference. Like most default computer-based random selection, iTunes is using a seed to start at a given point in a random number table; computers can only do pseudo-random number generation hence the reason Party Shuffle and many streamed Internet radio streams can appear to have a repetitive pattern after continuously selecting tracks from the same playlist for several hours.

An algorithm can be added to do what you want, but it would have to create pointers to track each new artist to insure that another track by that artist is not selected until tracks by all other artists have been played. That pointer list can quickly grow to rather large in a sizable playlist with a large number of unique artists. For instance my Urban Radio playlist contains 2,703 songs by 449 artists. Tracking that many artists for the type of shuffling you wish to have is going to require considerable processor overhead.

[sheilanolan]

It doesn't even do mainstream well - it couldn't find anything for Tchaikovsky or even Bernstein and as for the Doctor Who album that I actually bought from iTunes......
I guess it will improve over times as more people upload their lists but I think that, once again, classical fans have got a raw deal.

[Penner]

It should be noted that Genius only works with tracks that are in the iTunes Store. Obscure music, or your own original music, will make it shrug its shoulders. This means, among other things, that you can never generate a Genius playlist based on any Beatles songs.
Therefore, it seems that this is not much more than a prettied-up implementation of the "Just for You" thing that the iTunes Store has been doing for a while.

[ibeetle]

mdawson said:

Quote

Besides, why on earth would anyone need or want a link to the store for music they already have? I have seen many a person?s iTunes library and I cannot recall a single instance where people knowingly left the link to the iTunes Store active; those that did failed to learn how to turn it off.

Well, lets say you download a single and decide to buy the entire album. Apple does offer free singles. One might decided they like that song, and with a link from the music player to the store purchase of the entire CD is quick and easy.

Another reason might be that one might have one album by an artist with multiple albums. The listener might be interested in knowing if iTunes has other albums by that or similar artist.

A couple of months ago I bought a film soundtrack from iTunes. It has several song by an artist that I quite liked and was not familiar with. Clicked on her name and was whisked away to her iTunes Music Store catalog.

Also there is other information within the iTunes Music Store. On that artist page (Dana Fuchs) I found a Biography, Top Downloads and Similar Artist.

But, as you said. If you do not buy from the Music Store the links serve no purpose. However, those that do use the store and I hear is several million people a day the links serve a invaluable and important purpose.

[sheilanolan]

Penner said:

It should be noted that Genius only works with tracks that are in the iTunes Store.

Doesn't work with the Doctor Who albums that are in the store. Guess it's still learning.

[mdawson]

If you never look at the contents of your music folder then why would you bother to set that preference? iTunes does not need to have your songs set up in an Artist/Album folder structure to operate properly or efficiently. The purpose of that feature is to make it easy for a human being to find music on their hard drive without having to scan through thousands of files with no reference to the artist or album.

I have that preference set for a reason and I had to tag the Artist field in iTunes in a particular manner in order to get those folders to be sorted correctly on my hard drive because iTunes did not have the appropriate sorting features prior to version 7. Because those (new) fields are not properly applied to an organized music folder I not only still have to leave the Artist field for tracks in iTunes in the ?Last, First? format, but I also cannot acknowledging guest artists, because tracks would otherwise be scattered across several folders on the hard drive despite being by the same artist and on the same album. That is not an organized iTunes music folder and it makes those new fields pretty much moot. I cannot totally utilize the grouping and sorting capability that those new fields permit because having non-uniform Artist fields will completely f? up the folder structure on my hard drive; hence the reason my artist fields are set up the way they are in the first place.

The fact that you do not use the feature does not negate the fact that an organized music folder should mirror the organization in iTunes or at the very least set up the folders such that the tracks/albums from a single artist remain together in a single folder for that artist and subsequently songs from the same album remain in a single folder for that album within that artist?s folder. The organized folder feature is not enabled by default, so it stands to reason that if someone goes out of their way to activate it, they have done so with a purpose in mind and therefore (rightfully) expect their music folder to be properly organized by iTunes without having to resort to some convoluted tagging scheme to force the issue.