Firtunately you dont have to restart to get rid of them. Just click the zoom button to change the window to the mini player, and then change it back to the full window. iTunes will re-draw the titles and they will be cleared up. Its still annoying, but at least you dont have to stop listening to music.

With iTunes, the location of the library is a growing problem. I dont see how Apple misses this. Over time, music collections grow. Laptop users can’t expand so something is needed. I believe what is needed is for iTunes to have 2 library locations available (local and remote). When the remote (i.e. firewire drive) location is disconnected, all those songsdissappear from your library.

Before my iPod was stolen (house theft in case you’re catching a theme here) I used to use it to store all my music & only kept a limited ammount of audio on my hard drive. iTunes sucks so much memory anyway, I usually preferred to play my iPod & save cpu resources for what I am working on.

I very rarely just browse my list of artists or albums just to see something I might want to play. I do that with CDs on a very regular basis, but, for some reason, almost never with MP3s, which is another reason for me to keep using CDs.

My strong suspicion is that this is because almost every CD spine is different and acts as a powerful associative shortcut. This was why in my proposed model the left pane would allow at least colour coding. There’s just something so dull about the same font every time and that little page with a musical note and the top right corner dog-eared (why?) It isn’t enticing in any way.

Heh, being a Mac geek I always preferred Aqua to XP’s 5 year old toy cupboard scheme. I guess the toning down is inevitably to foreground the content itself, but I wonder how far that will go.

Having to scroll up and down to find an artist or album I want to play has never bothered me, so I use that a lot, but really, I use a combination of features from iTunes to find what I want, from Artist to album to recently added lists, toggling from “from the top” to “from the bottom” order. I also use the browser window a lot, especially if I only want to listen to one album without anything else from my selection of music playing afterward. It allows me to isolate what I want to play really.

I very rarely just browse my list of artists or albums just to see something I might want to play. I do that with CDs on a very regular basis, but, for some reason, almost never with MP3s, which is another reason for me to keep using CDs.

I must say that if I like the artwork display with each album, I am finding it seriously slows down the program and impacts on its usability, at least on my old machines.

you mentioned in your previous iTunes post that the Aqua buttons had been replaced by rather dull ones. If I can’t deny the new ones aren’t all that exciting, I’ve never liked the use of Aqua buttons on the Mac at all, not anymore that I like the Playskool-type XP buttons, so I won’t mourn them being replaced.

All in all, iTunes is still the easiest player to use on the market I think. I used to use Windows Media Player and used to find it versatile enough, until I started using iTunes. I have tried several times to use Win Amp, but it always seems to me like, unless you’ve got a degree in computer sciences, it is virtually impossible to use. At least, iTunes is very usable, even with its quirks.