iTunes’ auto-complete: irritating

Posted by Pierre Igot in: iTunes
July 20th, 2003 • 11:11 pm

When editing music file tags in iTunes 4 (artist, title, etc.), the program seems to be using some kind of “auto-complete” feature similar to the one in Safari (for URLs and for form fields).

The problem is that it often automatically inserts text that you do not want there, only because the first few letters match the ones of another item. And this includes capitalization. For example today I had a few files whose artist was “les Rancheros”. I wanted to edit the artist field and started typing “Les Ranch…” with a capital L. Automatically iTunes would REPLACE my capital L with a lowercase l. I had no way of preventing it from doing so. The only solution was to let it make the change, and then go back with the mouse, SELECT the lowercase l and REPLACE it with a capital L. Grrr!

It’s one thing to design a “smart” feature such as text auto-complete. But at least make it optional so that people can turn it off when it is obviously giving the wrong suggestion and making the wrong change. There is no option in iTunes to disable the thing.


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