#Smart Playlists? Broken!
While everyone else seems to be harping on the “mini-store-as-spyware” angle of the 6.0.2 update to iTunes, I’ve noticed something else that seems to have gotten NO MENTION throughout this flurry:
6.0.2 BREAKS THE “MY RATING” OPTIONS WHEN CREATING SMART PLAYLISTS
In the spirit of Hofstadter: “Try it!”
Click to create a new Smart Playlist. Now set your condition to “My Rating”:
…and try to set those stars to anything but 5. Maybe 2 works, right? What about 3? 4? Snaps back to 5, doesn’t it? When I first noticed this on Malkovich (my iMac), I thought maybe it was a problem with my 3rd party mouse (a Logitech trackball which is pretty basic, as far as trackballs go, and has never before given me any problems) - - but the issue persisted when I swapped it out for the standard Apple optical mouse that ships with the iMac out of the box. CURIOUS! Tried it on KetelOne (the iBook) using just its built-in trackpad. No luck there either.
Can I get a WTF? Personally, I’m not all that worried about the mini-store thing. Hell, I practically asked for it not too long ago - - but I use these Smart Playlists ALL THE FREAKIN’ TIME. So needless to say, I’m pretty pished about this. This is Quality Control at its worst. When features - - SIMPLE UI FEATURES - - break when they’d previously worked fine. Anyone want to provide me with an excuse for that?
>Anyone want to provide me with an excuse for that?
I realise you just want to USE UPPERCASE and scream and rant, but the simple answer is: there wasn’t a regression test or the test wasn’t run.
Sorry to be mundane. Maybe you should use the feedback system, or raise a bug.
January 14th, 2006 at 2:53 pmNo need for apologies. But have you attempted to submit iTunes feedback? The “Submit iTunes Feedback” option from within the application takes you to a form where you can request new songs. This is hardly a way to submit a bug report about problems with the application itself. I spent quite a bit of time looking for exactly that kind of form; no such luck.
The point of the “excuse” comment is more: If it’s never broken in prior updates, why now? What aspect of this feature are we changing that we could cause damage to functionality?
January 14th, 2006 at 3:28 pmNod to: http://www.macmerc.com/news/archives/2961
January 14th, 2006 at 3:48 pmIt must be in the OS X version, as I have no problems with my 6.0.2 version running on XP, and I downloaded the new version the second it was available…I have not tried it on the OS X machine yet.
Lets hope the next release fixes this small bug in the OS X version of iTunes.
January 14th, 2006 at 4:27 pm…it’s not broken, well - not totally. It just seems as if the sensitivity is wrong when selecting the stars.
Move your mouse way over to the left - you can still set * or ** or *** or *** or (you get the idea) stars, but they are all crammed into the space of about * and **.
January 14th, 2006 at 5:01 pmre: Andy– Hmm… Indeed! Though “***” still seemed a bit on the broken side.
January 14th, 2006 at 6:59 pm