Upcoming iTunes 11 Update Will Restore Duplicate Song Search

14 years ago

After iTunes 11 arrived and brought much needed refreshment and improved the user experience, many of us were surprised to find out that Apple had removed the duplicate song finder, like Walt Mossberg the Wall Street Journal tech columnist.

Even Mossberg said that this move is a “drawback” in his review of iTunes 11, but he quickly added that Apple officials had suggested to him that this most convenient feature will “soon be restored in a minor update of the program”.

I myself found the iTunes option “Display Exact Duplicates” very useful, as I could identify duplicates with a single move, and could clean up my music library by finding the songs with multiple copies.

While the duplicate finder will return, some options won’t, and this includes the album cover browsing feature through the Cover Flow Carousel, which Apple claims was used by too few users.

The next minor update, which we expect to come soon, will also fix some bugs such as missing album covers, and another which prevents Apple TV users from wirelessly streaming cloud-based movies.

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8 Comments

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Reds-sarge

13 years ago

Hurray! I’m glad they removed a ton of crap from iTunes. Ping, etc etc. But removing duplicate finder was a bad choice 🙂

Networx

13 years ago

Didn’t even notice the duplicate song feature was missing….yet. Glad that it’s coming back. However, I’m really going to miss Cover Flow as I liked having the album art for the song that was playing displayed within iTunes while the song was playing. It was a quick way to glance over and see which album a particular song was from. Very useful for live album tracks, which I listen to a lot. I know you can click on the album art and open it up in a mini-player of sorts, but it’s not the same as having it in iTunes so your album art is in the same place as where you navigate your music. I’m not updating my main home computer until I really have to. I don’t sync any iOS devices to it so the old version of iTunes is staying on at least one of my machines.

Shorty_dammit

13 years ago

I just want my iTunes DJ back. Actually, I still have it, since I downgraded all machines back to 10.7 to get it back. I hope no mandatory upgrades will be required until/unless iTunes DJ functionality returns. It’s the only way I listen to music at home. Why they’d remove it is beyond me. And, no, nothing in 11 does the same thing.

Ryan

Reply to Shorty_dammit

13 years ago

Yeah, I think they were hoping that Up Next would replace it, but it falls short in a number of areas. Personally, I love the concept of Up Next and would like to see the features that made iTunes DJ what it is integrated into Up Next somehow. I only used iTunes DJ occasionally, but I did quite like it when I used it.

Shorty_dammit

Reply to Ryan

13 years ago

I’m sure it would be a decent replacement if they hadn’t dropped any features while they were at it. People requesting/voting via Remote is kinda nice to have sometimes. What I really don’t want to do without is the random playback with higher-rated songs chosen more often. That’s on almost constantly at my house. Even half an hour without it was getting on my nerves.
I’ve got who knows how many thousands of songs that I took the time to rate according to how often I want to hear them, simply because I learned of that feature of iTunes DJ. And it makes for an excellent “random” stream of music throughout the day, every day. I love it. And being without it just gets on my nerves, because I’m hearing lower-rated songs way too often without it.