How do I play selected albums in iTunes 11

Question

This was absurdly easy in iTunes 10.

• I select a Playlist (generally a smart one)
• I command click albums.
• I want to play those albums.

Further I may want to be able to play songs within those albums randomly. [Creating a play list from the selection each time is not really a viable solution]

For example in the image below, 3 albums are selected. I just want to play them.

Answer 1

I had this problem, and hated it. But there is an absurdly easy solution.

All that Up Next stuff is rubbish. If you select the Songs view, as opposed to the Artist or Album view, you will get a screen that is pretty much the same as the old iTunes, where you can select an artist and just pick one album from the list of their albums and play it. (Make sure Column Browser - Cmd+B - is visible.)

By doing this you lose the nonsense of it finishing one album then going on to play whatever the next album is in your library.

The developers are stupid, but this solution works. You can get the artwork in this view if you go to view options (Cmd+j on mac) and click "show artwork".

Answer 2

Select your albums as usual. Clear the Up Next queue (using button at top right of queue) Right-click on one of your selected albums, and choose 'Add to Up Next' from the popup Menu. That'll add all the songs from all the albums you've selected. Click the play button.

If you check the up next queue, you see all the songs from all the albums you selected.

Songs are grouped by albums though. I'm not seeing a way to get the songs in the queue shuffled

Answer 3

I've been having this problem too, so what I did was to create a 'Smart Playlist' and set its settings/rules to only play [albums] which contains [Album Name]. The playlist then gets populated with the results from your settings. Then every time you want to play another set of albums, just edit the rules and the results will get updated. I thought this was better than making a new playlist every now and then.

Apart from smart playlist though, I still haven't found any other way to play several selected albums.

Hope that helped.