Oh, iTunes, why are you so easy to hate?

I recently and foolishly updated iTunes to the latest version. This new version allegedly makes the Apple Music streaming service part better. I wouldn’t know because I don’t listen to streaming music because I am a dinosaur (that still buys all of his music digitally now, so I’m evolving, slowly).

The one new feature I noticed, other than gigantic cover art that consumes much of the interface, is the new Random Shuffle mode. What is Random Shuffle mode, you ask. It’s where you listen to an album and iTunes–with shuffle turned off–will jump to a random song from another album. If you do something–switch songs, click the shuffle button a few times, stand up and twirl while invoking the spirit of Steve Jobs, it sometimes plays the songs in order again. But then it starts shuffling them in short order.

It is somewhat maddening. I think about possible fixes–re-installing, rolling back to the previous version, rebooting, drawing a pentagram underneath my computer, but in the end I just switched to Groove Music. Yes, the bare bones and sometimes awful music player included in Windows 10.

It seems a little better than before, even if it’s ludicrous that you have to restart it to switch between the light and dark themes. But it plays my music in order, so it’s good enough for now.

I’ll try iTunes again after the next version comes out. For the superstitious types, it’s going to get even better, because the next major release will be version 13.

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