iTunes Annoyances - Let Me Count the Ways

iTunes started life as a great little app to play music. Over the years it has grown to gargantuan proportions and handles all of Apple's media as well as acting as a portal to the iTunes store. To me iTunes is bloated, over weight and needs a diet. Since that's not going to happen for a while I've decided to address some small but niggling issues and maybe help someone keep from pulling their hair out. Today I want to address a problem that plagued me when I started using iOS 9 on my new iPhone 6s. 

I work out to music and I suddenly ran into a problem with playlists. The first song repeated over and over. I could not get the next song to play. Hitting the couple arrow icon just started the song over again. 

First I wanted to see what my playlist had "Next Up" so I hit the three lines to the right of the play icon.

It showed me nothing but endless repeats of the same song. 

The solution is as simple to fix as the problem is to cause. When playing music the main screen has a to "arrow" icons at the bottom of the screen. One for "Shuffle" and the other for "Repeat."  Can you see the almost too small to read numeral "1" on the "Repeat" icon below? That means the selected song will play over and over and over... until you are sick of it or change the settings.

To stop this aural assault you just tap the same icon until the little "1" & the grey box around it goes away. BTW - The grey box is a visual signal that this function is selected. In this case if you select the "repeat" arrows and only tap once the grey box will be shown but no number. This means the playlist will repeat. Tap again, and the number 1 will appear and that song will repeat. I figure since the Home button on my iPhone is so close to the repeat icon in iTunes I inadvertently selected it without knowing it. 

Over the years Apple has tried to improve iTunes but it's still filled with small buttons which I am clueless to explain. If there were only one or two unknown buttons it wouldn't be so bad but every update of iOS or iTunes brings more changes and more new icons. If you add in the new Music service, old Playlists, Genius Playlists, Shared libraries and other functions things get confusing in a hurry. 

I hope this helps relieve some of the frustration out there. Write a comment and tell me your frustrations with iTunes. I'll listen, and just maybe, Apple will too.