Unusable iTunes User Interface

I’m not sure what Apple has been thinking in its recent updates to iTunes in terms of user interface. The changes have taken the product many, many steps back in terms of usability. Just the other day I installed a new DVD drive in my dad’s iMac and when we were testing it, I went into iTunes to burn a full DVD to see what happened. I created a new playlist with 3.75 GB of music, changed the iTunes preferences to burn a data CD/DVD and clicked burn. A few minutes later, I tested the DVD in my machine and found that it only had 551 of the 1054 items in the playlist. My dad mentioned I needed to check all the items in the playlist to burn them; I did this and got the full DVD. No where in the interface does it say that only the checked items will get burned; the burn button tooltip says something like “Burn Playlist to CD/DVD”; it doesn’t say “Burn only the checked items in the selected playlist”. That was my first problem.

The second was that I saw the browser window on my dad’s machine and wanted to see it on mine to play with. After a few minutes I found “Show Browser”, but I then only had 2 columns and my dad had 3. We searched under the View menu, control clicked, and everything else we could think of to get the column turned on. We stumbled upon the item in Preferences to “Show genre when browsing”.

While I’m beating up iTunes, let me continue. In the General Preferences section there is an item labeled Shared Name. When isn’t this under the Sharing section? Moving on. In the source list, you can’t click on Library, Store, or Playlists. Apple has mixed controls in this list to make things confusing. I also discovered that if you try to delete an item in a smart playlist, it won’t delete which is understandable, but in iPhoto if you delete an item from a Smart Album, it is removed from your library. Ever hear of consistency?

Let’s not forget that none of the controls are standard controls from the wacky toolbars to the odd color of the toolbar. How about the eye button in the lower right? The tooltip says “View library by artist, album, and genre.” I’m not quite sure how an eye fits that? Let’s look at the view icons in the upper right. The first two change just the bottom half of the window if the browser is shown while the third one changes the top and bottom. Does that make sense?

I think Apple just keeps cramming stuff into iTunes without paying much attention to usability. I’m sure people will disagree with me.