The skip, the whole skip, and nothing but the skip

My least-favourite iTunes 10 behaviour • 11 April 2011

I still like iTunes.

Despite my past and present work in online music, despite the cloud and my friends, I probably use iTunes more than any other form of music playback. This is partly through force of habit; it’s now been ten years (!) since I ditched Audion for the mothership’s approved playback mechanism.

I’m not entirely sold on the “iTunes has become bloated and slow” meme either.1 While Apple has undoubtedly made iTunes into quite a kitchen sink, I honestly can’t say that the various stores, media types, device syncing options, and social networks have noticeably changed or hindered my day-to-day use of iTunes for music playback.

But there’s this one little thing.

I started noticing it after the upgrade to iTunes 10, and it’s slowly starting to drive me crazy. It bites me every single day.2 See if you can reproduce it yourself:

  1. Type an artist name into iTunes’ search box. In my case, let’s say I have a lot of Belle and Sebastian tracks and I want to hear their stuff on shuffle. So I type belle sebastian into search and hit play. iTunes screenshot
  2. Now switch into mini player mode. Tuck that guy in the corner of the screen. It’s going to be a lovely twee morning! iTunes screenshot
  3. Now try skipping a few (between two and six) songs in a row. In my case, I was hearing a bit too much late-period stuff and started to pine for their early days, so was skipping until I hit some Tigermilk-era tracks… when suddenly, BAM!!! iTunes screenshot
  4. What the hell just happened?! Did Stu Murdoch have a Bach phase? No, he didn’t; we’re just hearing Glenn Gould all of a sudden. Expand back to the full player to confirm it: the search term is gone and we’re back on all-library shuffle. iTunes screenshot

And that’s it, really.

There are a few things that are weird about this behaviour. The first is that it only happens in the mini player; in full-size mode, no amount of skipping will clear the search term. The second is that the number of skips required to trigger the behaviour varies; for me it’s often as low as two but sometimes as high as six or seven. The third is that while I only started noticing this problem after upgrading to iTunes 10, at least some people have been experiencing it for several versions before that (though this problem is quite hard to Google for!).

My guess — and it’s just a guess at this point — is that this isn’t strictly a bug, but rather some sort of deliberate "the user must be confused and not want to be in this set of tracks" heuristic that was added to the mini player logic at some point. Which is all well and good except Apple it’s driving me crazy please don’t assume you’re smarter than your users arrrrrrgh!

Know more about this issue? Can you reproduce it? Want to join me in forming a support group, or just want to tell me I’m doing it wrong? You can find me as @flaneur on Twitter.

  1. I am sympathetic to this notion, though, if only because it might inspire some interesting, useful competition.
  2. Some disclaimers on my iTunes usage patterns: I am a shuffle addict (if I want to listen to an entire album in order, I usually do it elsewhere); I dislike having to curate playlists unless absolutely necessary; I prefer the “mini player”; I ride the “skip” button like a jockey.