Betalogue

For years (since 4.5), iTunes has had this feature where a little button with an arrow appears next to the track title, artist name, and album title:

In order for this arrow button to appear, you need to have the “Show links to the iTunes Store” option checked in the application’s preferences:

In previous versions of iTunes, if the option was checked, the button would appear next to each and every track title, artist name, and album title. As of iTunes 7.5, however, the button only appears in the columns for the currently selected track. (I am not sure when exactly Apple made that change.)

The really important thing about this button, however, is that it has a second “internal” function. If you option-click on it, instead of taking you to the iTunes Store, iTunes actually uses the button as an instruction to restrict your current library view to only tracks that match the track title, artist name, or album title.

And in fact there is a hidden option in iTunes’ preferences that lets you invert the behaviour of the buttons so that the internal function is the default one and the iTunes Store function is the one that requires the Option key modifier.

I have been using these buttons with the inverted functions for years now. Since my library contains tens of thousands of tracks, I often need to restrict my library view to only a certain set of tracks, usually all those by a given artist or from a given album. This can also be done with iTunes’ search field, of course, but the arrow buttons are a convenient shortcut for a certain kind of “search.”

However, more recently Apple seems to have made a change that makes the arrow buttons slightly less useful. Normally, when you do a search in iTunes using the search field, if you are using the three-column “Browse” view (with the “Genre,” “Artist,” and “Album” columns in the top half of the library view), then the search results are reflected not just in the track list in the bottom-half of the library view, which only shows the tracks that match the search request. iTunes only updates the contents of the “Genre,” “Artist,” and “Album” columns to reflect the results of the search, i.e. only shows in these columns the values that correspond to the tracks that match the search request.

In other words, if you search for “Jean-Louis Murat” in the search field in iTunes, iTunes shows you all the tracks that have “Jean-Louis Murat” in any of their information tags (track title, artist name, album title, etc.) in the bottom half of the library view. But it also changes the contents of the top half columns, with only the genres, artist names, and album titles from the list of tracks that are the results of the search.

Previously the grey arrow buttons would do the same thing as a search, i.e. they would produce a list of tracks in the bottom half, and then update the contents of the columns in the top half to reflect the list of tracks at the bottom.

Now, however, I find that, after I click on an arrow button, while iTunes still show the list of matching tracks at the bottom and still updates the contents of the “Album” column in the top half to only list the album titles for the tracks in the list of results, it no longer updates the contents of the “Genre” and “Artist” columns to reflect the list of tracks in the bottom half. It still lists all the artists in my library. All it does is that it highlights the artist name in the middle column (the “Artist” column), but it doesn’t even scroll down to that artist name to make it actually visible.

It is a much less useful behaviour, because the “Artist” column can actually be used to view the various artist names that match the underlying Sort Artist name that iTunes actually uses for finding tracks.

I believe this is a bug, but since the primary purpose of the grey arrow links is to sell more tracks at the iTunes Store, I doubt that Apple’s engineers pay much attention to the optional internal behaviour for these links. I’ll still report it as a bug, but it might be a while before we get this functionality back.

This entry was posted by Pierre Igot on Saturday, November 24th, 2007 at 5:38 pm and is filed under iTunes. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.