Interface Confusion

[andrewducker]

Last time I grabbed Quicktime it insisted on brining iTunes with it.  Fair enough, I thought, I'll take a look and see what all the fuss is about.

So I opened it up, told it that it was not, under any circumstances to move the music files around, and let it find all my mp3s.

And then thought I'd grab an album to listen to.

Only to find that there didn't seem to be a way to scroll down to a band, then show the albums that band has made, then play that album.

Well, not without scrolling through a very long list of tracks and then choosing all the tracks on the album.

User-friendly this isn't.

Am I being stupid, or am I missing something in the glories of the iTunes interface?

Comments

[coalescent.livejournal.com]

Hit the 'browse' button in the top right-hand corner? (Assuming whatever version you're using looks like the version I'm using.)

[original-aj.livejournal.com]

Or Control - B on Windoze, or on the "Edit" menu (god knows why it's there though)

[anjylle.livejournal.com]

I really do miss using WinAmp. I dislike the way iTunes sorts my mp3 files (consideringhte number of compilation albums I have, it's rather inconvenient to have to go hunting for the ARTIST name when I only know the DJ who played the track) (also, it insists on making a separate file specifically for compilation albums, thereby taking up twice as much space as it needs to -- grrr)

[andrewducker]

I used to use WinAmp, but switched to using Windows Media Player, which seemed to do everything that I needed, and allowed me to find the album/track I wanted faster.

Why don't you use iTunes any more?

[avatar.livejournal.com]

Faster then pressing J and typing in either part of the artist or song title? How??

[andrewducker]

The lack of a treeview makes it impossible to launch an album except by carefully selecting all the tracks.

Whereas in WMP I can use keypresses to drop down to the artist, hit right-arrow to open the tree up, select and album and hit enter to start it playing.

Or, of course, do a search (although iTunes searches in realtime, which is nicer than WMP, which does a search only when you hit enter or click on the search button).

[avatar.livejournal.com]

So it's easier only if you use albums?

[andrewducker]

Darnit - I meant "Why don't you use WinAmp any more?"

[cheekbones3.livejournal.com]

I agree: Winamp is still great!

[autopope.livejournal.com]

Just a guess ... because WinAmp doesn't run on OS/X?

[andrewducker]

Aaaah. Are there multiple MP3 players on the Mac, or is iTunes all you get?

[sbisson.livejournal.com]

iTunes pretty much killed the Mac MP3 player market.

And to your original question - use the browse option to get a 3 pane genre/artist/album filter at the top of the page - also use the search box to add finer filters to the main iTunes view.

[figg.livejournal.com]

You can set the file info to 'compilation' then it will appear in a seperate section, by album.

not much, but useful.


but I would be using the search funtion.

[azalemeth.livejournal.com]

As said above, browse, and/or a smart playlist...I personally love iTunes and can't stand WMP - if you don't want iTunes to muck about with the ordering of files, go preferences -> advanced, and uncheck "organise my music library". Or something like that.

And it's not just because I'm a mac-addict :-)

[andrewducker]

I just can't believe there's no easy way to say "play this album".

How do Smart Playlists work? Can I play a track, then add another track onto the end, and create a playlist while stuff is playing?

[terminalmalaise.livejournal.com]

What you want is to enable the view that looks like this. Assuming your music metadata is decent, it's actually a very nice interface for navigating large libraries IMO.

How you enable it, I don't know offhand--I currently favor musikCube on Windows and a couple of Linux players which all copy the design.

Forgot to say...

[terminalmalaise.livejournal.com]

Double-clicking the album title in the album pane shown in that screenshot is the easy way to say "play this album".

[azalemeth.livejournal.com]

There is a way to say 'play this album'. Click the browse button while in the library - so that you see the three-paned windows; the one on the right contains all albums. If you, say, select two artists in the middle, then their albums are shown; select those, and lay :P. Sounds more complicated than it is!

And smart playlists are just the generic "Show all tracks whose artist name begins with ...." and so on (you can choose from tons of criteria and they're quite nice.)

Oh, and you may want to have a look at party shuffle too :P.

[figg.livejournal.com]

"
Only to find that there didn't seem to be a way to scroll down to a band, then show the albums that band has made, then play that album."

I hit the browse button. Then three columns appear at the top.

I select [but usually ignore] genre from the genre column.
Then, The artist, and the album. All of these actions make the list underneath the columns more refined.

So yeah. Browse mode. I've never had a problem playing an album, infact I find it easier than winamp [ver 2.x pre media library]

[andrewducker]

Thank You!

I had no idea I was supposed to click on the eye in the corner of the screen.

That's not terribly, y'know, user friendly.

[figg.livejournal.com]

Yeah, Sadly. It should be on by default.

It took me a while to find the button too.