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

[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.