With iTunes 11, Apple has made some major changes to its popular media player and has faced constant criticism for doing so. One such change that Apple made, is that they did away with Cover Flow – A 3D interface element that lets users visually flip through snapshots of documents, website bookmarks, photographs and finally album artwork (In iTunes).
Users who are frustrated due to the lack of Cover Flow in iTunes 11 are trying to take matters in their own hand. A group of people led by Christian Theißinger are staging a petition to bring back CoverFlow. Christian had also posted about this on Apple’s support community, but his links to the petition were removed, as they were not in accordance to their terms of service.
For many users including me, Cover Flow was a great way to browse through music. Not only did it look good but it also provided great functionality.
Choosing through the covers was a great option on iTunes (it is my default mode combined with the column-listing) and it’s one of the best ways for Apple to sell “immaterial” music without making regrets for the CD buyers… Bring back CoverFlow to Us, Apple !!! – Allain Lortall, France.
If you will like to support the movement to bring Cover Flow back to iTunes, please go sign to petition here.
I made the mistake of installing the iTunes 11 update without checking about it first. The loss of Cover Flow is another nail in the coffin for Apple (or should that be crApple?) as they continue with their policy of deliberately crippling Apps that worked perfectly (like Address Book) to make them iPad/Phone friendly and marginalise the people who have spent £1000s on their real computers with big screens.
I’ve spent ages assembling decent artwork for my collection of 20k + songs and scrolling through the art in the big window made interacting with my music a joy. These new tiny letterbox views that isolate one album from another are just useless.
Having a child with special needs too highlights the fact that for many people Cover Flow provided a means of easy access which the new highly mouse and text based system does not.
Reading his biography Jobs ethos was clearly ‘keep it simple’ which is what Cover Flow did and the new way doesn’t.
WE WANT COVER FLOW AGAIN
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Using overflow was a great way to organize genres when you have so much music of many various artists. I can’t stand the new iTunes 11 update and will remove as soon as possible. Big leaps backwards in my opinion!!!
I Agree – PLEASE re-instate coverflow. I have emailed Apple a couple of times about the new iTunes – VERY backward step!
I loved coverflow, it made the whole iTunes experience, it made your music like a showcase and getting artwork for your music helped restore the collector experience that was lost with the transition to digital music / mp3′s. Removing this showcase function from iTunes, is like selling the crown jewels to the local pawn shop. iTunes 11 is pretty good but no coverflow is just crazy. Quick someone reanimate Steve’s perfectly preserved zombie carcass, so he can go blue in the face with rage about people mishandling his company (and then eat their brains!).
I miss you coverflow!!!! The absolute best thing for entertaining where the album covers shows up for each song playing. Amazing! You blew it Apple!
iTunes sucks without it!
Choice has been sacrificed for dictatorship, we had choice before to cover flow or not to cover flow but all has gone, do it apple’s way or no way.
What research apple has done to justify this removal has obviously sustained many false positives or even inclined to biased questioning.
The only hope is to roll back to a previous version, and condemn the buffoon who made the decision to remove the slick easy to find album (amongst many) cover flow.
What a catastrophic decision by Apple !! Coverflow : the feature in iTunes that was one of the main reasons that made me switch from windows to mac. Meanwhile I have purchased 2 iPod’s an iMac an iPad and an Apple TV and have convinced friends to switch to Apple. The coverflow option differed iTunes from all other media players. Version 11 is just ‘another player’ that can easily be replaced by any other player. I spent months to gather all coverflow- artwork and put in all the correct tags to use them in my mac connected to my LCD screen in my living room. This (mediacenter) has now become useless.
I allready downgraded back to iTunes 10.7 and have switched off automatic updates for iTunes. I also refuse to update my Apple TV3, afraid that I might lose the graphic front row interface like I did when updating to Mountain Lion!
After the mistakes of removing frontrow in (Mountain) Lion (that I used for all my movies and concerts) and the introduction of the horribly cheap looking new iPod Nano 7, Apple is rapidly destroying its unbeatable graphic interface image. What will be next? The removal of the swipe-function in iPhoto……
Wouldn’t be surprised if they did. A very sad thing to see!!
I made the mistake of blindly upgrading to iTunes 11 and have now downgraded to 10.7 too. iTunes 11 is a serious step backwards. I was about to refresh some of my Apple products and buy a new iMac, iPad and iPhone when this “improvement” was released, but have decided not to now. Alarm bells should be ringing at Apple that a growing number of their customers think they’re losing that which made them different. It’s as if Apple no longer cares about what their customers want or they can’t be bothered to strive to create the kind of experience that makes it a joy to use their products. Apple aren’t just dumbing down, they’re dulling down too and are making too many mistakes with half baked badly thought through products.
I’d never have thought of doing it before, but I’ve started downloading music from Amazon and have been looking at what Samsung and and the rest of the Android gang have to offer. I’m both surprised and disappointed to find myself on the cusp of parting ways with Apple. I don’t want to – but I think iTunes 11 is symptomatic of the way things have been going for a while and unless it’s fixed pdq it will probably prove to be the catalyst for me to change.
BRING BACK COVERFLOW!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Bring back cover flow, or no go!
i want my coverflow back
I went back to 10.7 as well – its easy to do
uninstall 11 and reinstall 10.7 – google it
It looks like Windows now I hate it that overflow is removed and i regret the day that i have lost it during the update really bad move Apple
File this under “What the Rahtid-Apple wuz they thinkin’ “? I mean seriously. Could anyone in that windowless, airless decision room at One Infinite Loop imagine Steve Jobs doing this? (The removal of “CoverFlow” that is.) Steve once said “Dont f*ck it up?”. Hope it’s not too late.
What a dirty trick, Apple. When I trusted you to upgrade my iTunes, I trusted that it meant an improvement such as adding a new feature or improving something. That’s because I TRUSTED you. But you took away a feature I loved without warning me. Very bad. Seriously disappointed and WARY, now.
‘Knock-knock’
‘Who’s there?’
‘iTunes’
‘iTunes who?’
‘iTunes sucks
I’ve been an Apple supporter since the Apple IIe. This new version on iTunes is EXTREMELY disappointing. I’ve been running it for a few weeks now and DO NOT understand why you would take out features that were GROUNDBREAKING at the introduction of iTunes.
Artists are huge supporters of Apple, so take out one of the biggest features of iTunes, Cover Flow??? This is the regression of what makes Apple different. “Think Different” was a great campaign and two words that WERE the core values of Apple.
I expected an enhancement. Perhaps a design tweak. Well you tweaked it alright. You dumped a core feature. Thanks Apple (sarcasm).
Little by little you are taking the “cool, think different” quality away from your programs and devices and pushing me towards your copycats in the Microsoft family. It will take a lot more to get me off of the cliff than removing cover flow, but can your crack executive team (or executive team on crack) please explain to me why you are dumping these features? Can you give me a reasonable answer?
Now I’m stuck w/ something that looks like it was designed for Windows. Hard to believe, but it’s true.
Sincerely,
- A long time Apple supporter and great customer
come on Apple get your house in order,bring back cover flow or we are all going back to win amp,it cant be that hard to fix,or do you’s not know how to do it????
Crazy. Coverflow rocked. Let us decide if we need a feature. Put it back in the next update, it’s that simple
Who did they let mess with a good thing!? Damn I’m so annoyed!!
Me too! I hate the new look. As far as I’m concerned it looks horrible and the functionality is worse! Bring back coverflow!
ps I love the idea that apple thinks too few users were interested in it. How many thousands or more would that be?
Bring back COVERFLOW ! It was what made apple different and beautiful! GRRRRR
Thank you Berlin Enrico, I quite agree.
It’s funny, i posted a simple question somewhere else on the apple site, and all I got was abuse from someone who said I was old-fashioned! Amazing that people can be so small minded! cheers everyone! Kennedy
I don’t really care about the cover flow, but I definitely miss the box at the bottom left that displayed the album cover art. Now I just have a boring gray menu.
Bring CoverFlow back, It was the only really good way to visually search my music library.
The perfect place for Coverflow, where it is BADLY needed, is in the SONGS view. Album and Artist views are helpful in their own ways, but I rely highly on finding things based on “Date Added,” and Album and Artist have no sort function for this. (With Artist I can understand, but with Album it is absurd not to allow this option. It would be so easy to implement!)
This leaves Songs as the only view in which Date Added is a sort option. So it is incredibly inconvenient that Songs view has NO album art representation whatsoever. They could AT LEAST reinstate the old Album by Artist view which had a thumbnail on the side, similar to how artist view looks now. Maybe they thought this was too similar to Artist View, (though anything optional shouldn’t bother anyone,) so this makes Cover Flow in songs view the perfect option. It could scroll as you click through the song list, or flipping through cover art could scroll the list (or at least jump to the location by selecting artwork.)
Come on iTunes, album art is so key in navigating large libraries. You did such a crappy job of supporting the tagging of album art for so long (no function to surf the web, only supplying art in the iTunes store – YEESH, how annoying, as if that represents all music worth owning.) Get on the stick an reinstate Coverflow!
I switched to to Mac at the times that Vista did its appearance, because my belief was that Mac had much more to offer. Since i did that and updated from Tiger to Leopard, SL, L, ML, we all have been losing cool features update after update.
My current position is that Apple is far more dictatorial than Microsoft has ever been.
I loved the full screen coverflow as a party mode player, I loved the way I could handle my lists based on the coverflow covers, and even the fact to double click its window bar to minimize to the dock. Now all of these features have gone for good and I just don’t like itunes anymore. I have tow options: uninstall itunes 11 and roll back to 10.7 or I will stick to XBMC as my main living room player and forget that useless software thanks, again, for nothing to Apple.
My next platform won’t be the dictatorial Apple anymore. I’ve got enough.
I wanted to add in my strong opposition to CverFlow being removed. I will not upgrade until it is restored or until they no longer support the version I am on. If that day comes, I will be seriously looking for something else. I don’t know how far that will go yet, but I could drop all of my Apple stuff, just as quickly as I adopted it. I love iTunes the way it was and I first purchased an iPod touch because of how easy it was to remotely control my music selections. Then I got an iPhone and then my wife got one. I would hate to have to switch, but I will.
I would also like to add that there is not one post here defending the removal of cover flow. Apple, are you watching????
My wife just updated itunes to update her Iphone or something like that. I’m loving the new look itunes, all i have to do is delete 135 GB of music leaving me with 1GB and ill be able to navigate it seamlesly. I’ll be rolling back to 10.7 and buying a galaxy for the missus.
I am pissed that cover flow is gone!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
I have been trying to give the new look a chance without the cover flow. I am not happy with this change nor the complete disregard for it as an option, an extension, an add-on or app for those who take the time to assemble a beautiful collection of cover art. What is the use of a pretty iTunes interface if you cant interact with your music?
This too in conjunction with the missing DJ function cripples the music experience not only during personal use but during small or large gatherings etc. To add insult to injury the new cover theme doesn’t even shift, flow, or jump to whats “up next” when the song changes. What good is that? Pretty but USELESS. The set up has also changed the easy remote use from whatever device a user might be using to interact with their music. I am so glad to see I am not alone in my vehement disapproval.