Opinions on iTunes 10
Recently, I upgraded to iTunes 10.0.0.68. I really should learn to stop upgrading (or is it downgrading) as I am almost always more disappointed than happy with the experience.
The first thing that I noticed was that version 10 set the "as Album List" option which removed my column settings (which ones, their width, and their order) without asking me. Also, I was not thrilled about the fact that it added two columns that I could not move or remove: album (with artwork and rating) and track number. I prefer the album column after the artist column (or 6th in my standard layout), but I could not move it. Also, I had extraneous data; there was one column with the track number but was not configurable so I had to add back the “track x of y” column and then had, in effect, two track columns. All of these issues were resolved when I found the setting "as List" in the view menu; however, I am not sure why this was changed without warning in the first place. In addition, out of all of the sub-sorting for albums, why is there no setting to sort albums by rating?
There have been a couple of improvements though. The fact that the album artwork is shown in the album column in album list view is nice, but I wish that Apple made this a configurable setting so that it could be turned off to save space. Also, I like that the album column in that view automatically rates albums as the mean of the ratings of the songs on the album; however, this feature could be improved if the rating was overrideable by clicking a different value and would use 1/4 stars or at least 1/2 stars for a more fine-grained display.
At least there was nothing earth shatteringly broken from this upgrade like there was when upgrading from version 6 to version 7. For those that do not remember back that far, version 7 is the one that broke backwards compatibility so that older versions of iTunes and other music players (such as Amarok, Banshee, and Rhythmbox) were no longer able to connect to its DAAP music share. If Apple keeps breaking things and blatantly discarding my settings, I may have to switch to Banshee at work.