iTunes 11: tips and tricks

[jarin420]

Yup thats where I am. Maybe its because its on iCloud?

 

[jarin420]

Ah yes it was, I downloaded the album and now I get see it.

 

[Jesse Hollington]

Yup, that would do it. You can't get track names for items that are only in iCloud, probably because there's no local file for it to analyze.

 

[decafjava]

Well having used this for awhile it seems that some small behaviours have changed. Skipping seems to be counted differently. Before I had most of my rotational smartplaylists set up so that if I skipped a song it would drop off since I created a rule "do not play song that was skipped in the last x." Now if I am switching between playlists I would stop the song that was playing (trying to stop it in the beginning as I understood the first 20 seconds don't count) and then start the new one. No problem the song remained at the top of the playlist for when I returned. However now it seems when I did that it counts as a skip and the song would drop off. So I removed this rule and it works as before. Just to clarify, this is on live updating smartplaylists streamed through itunes on my computer at home.

I found a better solution thought, the "up next" feature allows me when I want a song on a playlist to be the last and to end it there by clearing the queue of upcoming songs so i can then use my remote to change to the new playlist. Excellent!

 

[mastakilla]

thanks for the tips!

 

[reched]

160 Problems with new iTunes

Cannot get my 160 gig classic to sync with iTunes 11. Don't even know how to do it.

 

[reched]

Or how do I go back to the previous version of iTunes?

 

[Code Monkey]

Or how do I go back to the previous version of iTunes?

You uninstall iTunes 11, you install iTunes 10.7 & make sure you point it to the .itl file located in the previous versions directory that iTunes 11 created when you installed it. Keep in mind, any changes you've made to your library since updating will have to re-done.

If you didn't keep an older install, grab it off of filehippo: Download iTunes 10.7 (64-bit) - Change Log - FileHippo.com for 64 bit, Download iTunes 10.7 (32-bit) - Change Log - FileHippo.com for 32 bit

 

[Jesse Hollington]

Cannot get my 160 gig classic to sync with iTunes 11. Don't even know how to do it.

Not really sure what you're specifically asking here... It should actually work in mostly the same way that it did in iTunes 10, albeit with some interface changes.

Plug it into your computer, and you should see a button appear in the top-right corner showing your iPod. Click on that and you can access the various sync settings. However, if you're using automatic sync, it should still sync automatically in iTunes 11 as soon as you plug it in.

 

[reched]

The only thing I see are icons for view and edit in the upper right hand corner.

 

[manchali]

Anyone know how to refresh the thumbnails? For playlists, grid view, some of the thumbnail artwork is showing up wrong. Songs have been manually tagged with correct artwork but certain songs for some reason do not show the correct artwork. The correct thumbnail shows up in now playing window...

Also just noticed that incorrect thumbnails are also displaying when running a search for artwork that displays just fine in grid view, sigh....

I upgraded to 11.0.1.12 (windows x64), the correct artwork displays when running a search now. But I still have issues with incorrect thumbnails displaying in grid view. I wish they had "set default grid artwork" for iTunes 11. It would solve my issues, I think (if it worked this time).

 

[Jesse Hollington]

The only thing I see are icons for view and edit in the upper right hand corner.

It should be up by the "iTunes Store" button:

If it's not appearing, double-check that your iPod classic is showing up at all in Windows Explorer or Finder. The basic procedure for syncing is no different than it was in previous versions of iTunes -- only the user interface has changed.

In fact, if you turn the sidebar back on from the View menu, you'll get the old "Devices" listing back along with it, and your iPod classic should appear there in much the same way as in prior versions.

 

[snash22]

I was unable to download new episodes of Podcasts when I upgraded to 11 in Windows 7.

Running iTunes as Administrator fixed the problem.

 

[oobujoobu]

There are 2 main questions I have that are currently stopping me from upgrading to 11, any help appreciated-


1 - I use the "Sort Album" field extensively for all my albums, as I have the album release date contained within this tag, e.g. "1963-11-22-With The Beatles". This means that for every artist I can view my albums chronologically, or I can even view my entire library chronologically. I assume that in a simple list view this is unaffected, and I can still see this, and that it will still show these albums chronologically on my iPod when it is sync'd? How does the loss of coverflow work? With the new album cover view, will I be able to show my album covers on screen chronologically still? (As you can maybe tell, chronology is a BIG deal for me!).

2 - A less important point for me, more of an irritation, but I currently have my iPod settings so that any song with a bit rate of more than 256kbps is converted to 256kbps when being transferred to my iPod. This is because some of my library is lossless and would blow my iPods memory if unconverted! The down side to this is that I do not have gapless playback on my iPod for any files that have been converted in this way (I do have gapless for the files I have encoded at 192kbps and therefore are not re-encoded when transferred to the iPod). Just wondering if anyone knows if this bug had been fixed in version 11?

Thanks in advance....

 

[irwinmatten]

Ok after midnight in euroland- have a backup of iTunes 10.7, just backed up my iPhone 4 through iTunes AND the cloud. Will back up my library tomorrow and ONLY THEN install iTunes 11.

Thought to start a thread to deal with bugs and issues, new features, figuring out if old features are hidden or gone for good (like iTunes dj and coverflow not a biggie for me but...).

Have read on other forums some old features are turned off by default and you have to dig a bit to get them back (status bar, list view). Most worrying, one fellow claimed smartplaylists depending on playcount and last played are broken unless you turn off crossfade??? WTF??? I asked others there to confirm-and will check myself tomorrow and this weekend.

So hopefully some of you vets can contribute and we can get a bunch of good info together for the noobs.

iTunes 11: Turning off crossfade allows the songs 'plays' and 'last played' variables to be updated, at least so far. I hate iTunes 11. Does anyone know how to get back 'List Duplicates' option that was in iTunes 10?

 

[Jesse Hollington]

The iTunes 11.0.1 update has added the Show Duplicates option back. It can be found under the View menu.

 

[irwinmatten]

1- Looked all over and can't find it either. That was useful once in awhile, so hopefully its just hidden somewhere.

2- No not seeing that, but I'm only running 11 on a limited library on my test PC so I may not have any albums tagged either way.

Answer to #1. I was using iTunes 10 when I mistakenly updated to 11. Big mistake. Running Windows 7 and was using 'List duplicates' extensively. Now I can't find the option. Called apple support and they said it is not in 11. Also said I could not restore back to iTunes 10. Bummer! Handcuffed. Don't go to 11 just yet.

 

[rockmyplimsoul]

The iTunes 11.0.1 update has added the Show Duplicates option back. It can be found under the View menu.

This also includes the "Show Exact Duplicate Items" if you hold the Shift key before making your selection. The Exact qualifier essentially adds album name and track number to the comparison.

I've always been diligent with making sure I don't have duplicates in my library, but I thought I'd run this just for kicks. Well, it found something interesting ... it is reporting a small number of exact duplicates in my library.

Upon closer review, for some reason iTunes is using iCloud to compare against my local library, and these "duplicates" are not really duplicates at all -- one "copy" is the cloud and the other is my local copy!

While I'm relieved that my library is still clean, I'm curious why iTunes would use the cloud as the basis for comparison. I don't use iTunes Match, and all purchases are on my PC. I can't see what's special about these songs since they do not represent all my purchases. These "duplicates" do appear identical -- no tag differences that I can see except one is in the cloud and one is local.

I turned back on the "Cloud Status" column in my library, so now I see these songs with a cloud symbol, and the local copy right next to them. What's really peculiar is if I select the global "Hide Music in the Cloud" setting, then the "Show Exact Duplicate Items" is a list of individual songs, with no apparent duplicates.

In a way I'm glad that this duplicates utility "found something", I'm curious as to why. Hopefully there's a good explanation, otherwise this utility is not as helpful if I have to weed out "cloud duplicates" which are not really duplicates at all.

 

[rockmyplimsoul]

Answer to #1. I was using iTunes 10 when I mistakenly updated to 11. Big mistake. Running Windows 7 and was using 'List duplicates' extensively. Now I can't find the option. Called apple support and they said it is not in 11. Also said I could not restore back to iTunes 10. Bummer! Handcuffed. Don't go to 11 just yet.

Per the posts above, the Show Duplicates utility is back in version 11.0.1, albeit with some peculiarities (can anything go smoothly with iTunes?!)

 

[rockmyplimsoul]

I've always been diligent with making sure I don't have duplicates in my library, but I thought I'd run this just for kicks. Well, it found something interesting ... it is reporting a small number of exact duplicates in my library.

I traced this issue to all my old "Protected AAC" songs in my library. Apparently iTunes thinks my local copies differ in some way from the ones in the cloud, so it shows them as being available to re-download while at the same time showing them as duplicates of what I already have :shake:

I re-downloaded a few of these and the new copies came down as the same old 128kbps protected format, which is the same as what I already have. Perhaps if I signed up for Match I'd be eligible to get the non-DRM versions, but that ain't gonna happen, and I'm not motivated to pay for the non-DRM versions of these.

So it seems that this duplicates query does have a problem, as well as the iCloud status of older protected AAC files. Time for an iTunes 11 bug report ...