Apple Releases iTunes 11.1 Beta 1 to Developers, Includes iTunes Radio

As if $24.99/year wasn't already a steal to have your music backed up in the cloud, no ads in iTunes Radio makes it even more worth it to get iTunes Match.

Awesome! Been waiting for this.

Not talking about songs, talking about albums. If you've got a classical piece several movements long, you can't queue the movements up without Up Next doing an impression of Clippy: "You seem to be listening to music! I have filled your list with other music! Thank me!"

This is not intended to be sarcastic or condescending in any way, but this has always worked for me so I want to describe it step by step.

Step 1: In iTunes, select album view (I'm assuming the movements are in one "album")

Step 2: Find the album you are looking for and select the song from that view.

Now for me, this will play that song immediately, and have the rest of the album queued up.

Alternatively you could add the rest of the movements my adding them manually to the up next playlist.

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Is it only for iTunes radio or for library songs as well?

Is this only available to a Paid Dev. Acct. I have a free dev. account but can't find the link?

Paid only.

Here's what I mean

This is not intended to be sarcastic or condescending in any way, but this has always worked for me so I want to describe it step by step.

I understand that I can use this to play a single album. And I thank you for the explanation.

But that doesn't help much when playing classical music. It's a use case that they broke.

Suppose I decide that want to play, say, Fakename-ovich's 8th and 10th symphonies. I have them tagged so that the 8th is an album and the 10th is an album. I play the 8th as an album. It plays through and then stops. Hurray! Nothing random! Except now the music's stopped. Only through manual intervention at that point can I get it to go on to play the 10th, by manually selecting it.

If I don't want to have to do this start-stop-and-intervene every time, every piece, an album at a time all afternoon long, I can use Up Next. Goes like this. I queue up the 8th and the 10th, I get the 8th, the 10th, and whatever the hell little iTunes Clippy decided I wanted to listen to next, which may or may not include ukulele.

The little checkbox that says, "Don't autofill Up Next"? The one that would perfectly suit my case here? There ain't one. Load two albums into it, and then Mac Clippy says, "You seem to be listening to music! I have loaded up your Up Next queue with a bunch of music you didn't pick! Thank me! No, I can't stop doing that! Thank me again!"

Now, I could put it on shuffle, and get random movements chopped out of random pieces in random order. Or I could make a playlist I'm only going to use once.

Or Apple could turn a feature which is currently unusable for me into one that's exactly what I need, by adding one little checkbox: "Don't autofill Up Next."

Edit: Yes, it is possible to add movements, one by one, to Up Next. But who wants to add each of the 30 Goldberg Variations, one at a time?

I mean, I spent probably two hours with iTunes 11, trying this, that, and the other, because I couldn't believe they'd broken so obvious a use case. But they did.

Now if they would use the album art instead of the iTunes icon that would be cool. :)

How about instead of blowing up a forum just submit a request to Apple.

Here I'll make it really, really easy for you:

http://www.apple.com/feedback/itunesapp.html

.

Yes, that is the form I used months ago to give them this feedback. Let's see if they listened.

Edit: The other option would be for me to set up an alternative interface using the osascript command-line interface to the Applescript dictionary of iTunes, presented for access around the house via a web interface (most likely Django). In my experience using the AppleScript dictionary of iTunes 11 earlier this year, the interface is quite slow if you're doing mass actions, and taking another look at Applescript grammar for the first time since Hypercard I see it remains the same hit-or-miss weirdness it was back in the 1980s, so getting a comprehensive python-manipulable list of iTunes tracks is still done much more efficiently by parsing the XML of the file you get from "Export Library." But in terms of accessing the album art and creating a nonce playlist, since you're dealing with only a small number of tracks at a time, that's well within AppleScript's capabilities.

Just seems like a lot of work for one checkbox Apple left out.

For having used iTunes for 10 years, I can say it's BY FAR the worst Apple product/software of all.

It's getting more and more bloated, slow, inefficient, uninnovative and late (still no Flac? No streaming library? No Subgenres field? No Label field? No plugins?)

A huge piece of **** that used to be, with the iPod, the first reason why I switched to Apple a while ago...

Can someone with access to it let us know whether they've undone what I consider iTunes 11's biggest stupidity, in which the Up Next's list INSISTS on filling itself with random stuff I don't ask for when I just want to listen to one album?

I probably shouldn't jump in on this, and I'm not trying to be condescending or rude, either, but I have absolutely no idea what you're talking about. Since when does the Up Next feature add anything by itself? I add music manually, and whatever I add is all there is in Up Next. Does Up Next really autofill for you (and others on here who haven't argued with your main premise)??

In any case, you know you can add entire albums to Up Next at once, right? Even multiple albums at once (just right click on them in albums view, or anywhere else, as far as I know). And they should play in the order you add them, unshuffled.

Sorry — that's probably not helpful at all (I'm sure you already knew it), but I've never seen this autofill functionality or had any problems and I simply can't fathom what you're talking about.

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