When you first boot up the latest iTunes 11 it gives you two windows. One of them is for tutorials. I should never need a tutorial to use a jukebox program. I don't need a wizard either. But they gave us one.
Here is the crappy tutorial window that pops up. There is no way I'm going to touch anything on this. Immediately its in my way. So I off-click it.
Next up is the main player screen. The sidebar is gone. It looks like I don't have any album covers either. At least 50% of my music does not have anything. The first thing I try to do is get album covers. It takes me a minute to figure out I have to select all 168 albums. Then right click to "get artwork." It still fails on 50% of the albums. This album view is still very ugly.
As you can see here, iTunes can't get album artwork for all of my songs. Many of my euro-albums don't come up for example.
Hidden in some kind of cloud dialog box is your next/previous playtrack. WTF! Nothing as good as grooveshark.com
What the hell does this blue icon mean? Well it brings up a really shitty vertical timeline of upcoming tracks. It disappears when you are done. The fact it disappears and that its vertical pisses me off for some reason. Its a very small pop-up window for such a large feature.
The designers of iTunes were not done fucking up this piece of software. The biggest piece of shit in iTunes 11 is the updated miniplayer which is activated by an icon that looks like a "fullscreen" function. It actually shrinks your player and it goes into small piece of shit mode.
Here we have two icons that both look like they activate fullscreen mode.
Not only are the expand/hide icons now on the left instead of top-right (why did they move?), that shitty blue icon is back. It brings up a totally different looking playlist. Wait, where is the fucking volume control? OH, its inside that shitty up-vote arrow thats pointing to a square TV. What the hell is that icon supposed to be? Well we had to click it to find out.
The volume slider is horizontal. But since its a pop-out dialog now, they should have made it vertical, like youtube. They made it worse. Apparently it controls different zones but I have no idea whats going on when I click on these things. Its just another hidden control.
Whoever designed this piece of shit likes GUI features that magically disappear.
Lastly I have to say one more thing about the mini player. When you aren't using it all the controls disappear into an Apple icon. I accidently click the wrong button when I mouse over it and the controls suddenly appear. What the fuck were they thinking?
In album mode, a giant horizontal THING appears when you click on an album. If you don't have the full album, there won't be any information here. It will look even stupider when you don't have album art. More player controls appear within this band making it even more complicated.
At this point in the review I can tell you with certainty this is the absolute worst iTunes of all time.
Other complaints, there is a cloud icon, next to the category drop down that does absolutely nothing. I'm literally clicking on Mr. cloud, and nothing will happen. It looks nice at least. The itunes store also looks confused, with album covers slammed into the margins and scroll bars tha magically appear. I don't like the iTunes store now either.
The visualizer is the same, however the windowed version is gone. You must be in a fullscreen mode to access the visualizer now. Argh.
Lastly, a complaint I've had forever. Literally over half a decade I've been complaining about this. ITUNES DOESN'T REMEMBER MY PLACE WHEN I TURN IT OFF!!! Every computer system has saves. Even microsoft word will save my progress. But if I turn off iTunes, it won't remember my spot. Everything I was looking at or had queued up gets cleared away. It even sends me to a different window than before (The tutorial screen again).
Holy shit iTunes 11 is bad. I really do hope they start firing these guys in the iTunes divsion. Apple, you have some of the worst, backwards thinking, shitty GUI designers I've ever seen. What the fuck.
My you are so right on......biggest mistake apple ever made....Yes 10.7 was bloated, overrated, resource heavy, large library dysfunctional..but it worked! 10.7 makes 11 look like windows ME 2000. Someone please come out with a Music manager that will save apps and manage music....no cloud, no sync, no network broadcast just an app that works and I will pay for it!
ReplyDeleteSince this was written in November, I'm going to hope that you've figured out most of the things you were complaining about, so I'm not going to be too harsh, but man, do you come off as a complete and total moron. Want the sidebar? option+command+s. If you have ever used macs at all, you should know what the full screen button looks like and the mini player button looks nothing like it. Besides, even if you didn't, is it really that inconvenient to click it once, find out what it does, then know from that point on what it is? The "up arrow" button you're talking about is the airplay logo, again, standardized across all apple devices and who cares if the volume slider is horizontal or vertical? It's horizontal in the main iTunes screen too... The cloud icon that you complain about so much is for iTunes Match...where all of your music is stored in iCloud...so you can download it on any apple device whenever you want. Basically, everything you complained about, you could have solved if you just messed with it for 10 or 15 minutes instead of immediately screaming "IT LOOKS DIFFERENT I NEED TO WRITE A BLOOGGGGGGG!" Go buy a PC and download winamp or something.
ReplyDeleteYou wrote an entire paragraph on how to use an mp3 player. iTunes has a bad interface. It used to be a great product.
ReplyDeleteBut...it doesn't, you just don't like the way it is by default. With a few VERY simple tweeks, it's the same interface as it was before the update.
ReplyDeleteCan't stand that when you've got a freshly installed computer it wants to delete all your songs from your iphone/pod/pad/whatever before you can put new music on it. It never fails to waste hours of my time before I can put a new album (I buy physical cd's) onto my phone. Hate-this-crap.
ReplyDeleteI am a computer nerd from day 1, and I find iTunes to be the stupidest software on the planet. It is user abusive, the interface is all over the map. Why does a music/video player take hours to use and modify? It is hard to believe that a company with almost unlimited resources can produce a piece of crapware like iTunes. And... stop trying to wipe out everything on my iPod!
ReplyDeletecould not agree more to this assessment.. has anyone tried amarok or other alternatives to itunes.. i am over itunes and for my own sanity need something different. ..
ReplyDelete