When Apple launched iTunes 11 in late 2012, many longtime iTunes users were shocked to find their beloved sidebar absent after upgrading. Thankfully, a quick trip to the Menu Bar could restore the missing sidebar, but history looks to be repeating itself with the first beta of iTunes 12, released to developers this week.

The upcoming version of iTunes unsurprisingly introduces a visual overhaul inspired by what’s been seen thus far of OS X Yosemite. Each media section can now be found via its own icon in the iTunes navigation bar, and the iTunes sidebar is once again missing by default.
Unfortunately, users won’t find a “show sidebar” option in the iTunes 12 menu structure, and there’s no reference to the sidebar at all. But all is not lost! Apple has maintained the sidebar-style interface for the Playlist view of each media section.
To see it in action, select a media section from the icons on the left of the iTunes navigation bar then click the Playlist button at the center of the navigation bar. The screenshots demonstrate this process with music, but it works the same for all forms of iTunes content.
Voilà! The iTunes sidebar returns! Well…at least, sort of. Unlike the sidebar in previous versions of iTunes, this sidebar view in iTunes 12 only displays the current content category. That is, when you’re in the music section, you won’t see movies, TV shows, or podcasts listed in the sidebar, although playlists do persist between sections, allowing users to build playlists comprised of various types of media.
Also of note, the traditional iTunes list view is still available, but you’ll find it now in the drop-down on the right of the navigation bar as “Song List” with various user parameters (e.g., Song List by Album, Song List by Artist).
It’s clear that Apple is trying to steer users away from the sidebar, and the company’s default album view is visually impressive. But longtime iTunes users who prefer the “traditional” iTunes layout may be fighting a losing battle with Apple. It’s great that the company preserves some forms of sidebar and list views in iTunes 12, even if they’re harder to find and lack some functionality, but how much longer will Apple continue quietly relegating these layouts before they’re gone completely?
iTunes 12 and OS X Yosemite are still in beta, of course, and won’t launch until the fall. Apple could continue to refine the iTunes user interface during that time. It’s also worth noting that Apple made several significant functionality and layout updates in the months following the release of iTunes 11, and could follow suit with iTunes 12.
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30 thoughts on “iTunes 12 Continues Apple’s Quiet War on the Sidebar”
And, I use iTunes as a large library with manual selection of tracks. For that quasi-pro use, the list view and sidebar-playlists are absolutely critical. The album art view simply does not give enough information for practical, at-a-glance look. Why would they try to move those kind of users out?
Yes, there is a separate “sort” field for every item in iTunes, allowing “The Charlatans” to be sorted by “C” rather than “T.” You can change or fix sorting information by right-clicking on the album or track, selecting Get Info, and then clicking on the Sorting tab. There, change the “Sort As” field to just “Charlatans.”
Catch a freakin’ clue, geniuses. No one wants your hipster garbage interface – we want reliability and practicality! You should be ashamed that people fear a new version of itunes instead of being happy that a new version is available.
Apple is making it really easy to make the switch to another, easier-to-navigate OS…
And there in a nutshell is why Apple are going down the toilet. They’re meant to be designing products and software for the USER not to amuse themselves. Yosemite’s also a big bag of wow-look-at-all-this-needless-change-for-change-sake shite! My next computer? A PC for sure.
happy about the changes in loosing the sidebar. I have now been able to find
it but it only shows 1 category at a time completely useless. so unintuitive.
what a waste of time and effort. When will Apple stop trying to steer us away from the sidebar
Apple, if I want iOs I buy an iPad, but I bought a laptop for a reason. Stop visualizing all as if my life is a tablet!
If people really didn’t like what Apple was doing or how it was behaving, consumers would NOT be buying Apple products!
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