I didn't think twice about installing iTunes 11 the day it was released in late November. After all, application updates frequently fix software bugs that attackers can exploit, so I've made a habit of installing them quickly. Given that the upgrade had been billed as a major makeover, I was eager to experience whatever new hotness Apple tastemakers had thought of next. I never thought they'd kill the feature that, six or so years earlier, had prompted me to forsake the once revolutionary Winamp and make iTunes my music player of choice.

I'm speaking of iTunes DJ, of course. The feature just oozed with the stylish aesthetics that Apple cofounder and former CEO Steve Jobs was legendary for prior to his death in 2011. When I fired up iTunes 11 for the first time, I was shocked to discover that Apple had killed it off. In its place was "Up Next," a new feature that some iTunes aficionados argue is a step forward.

But this Ode to iTunes DJ argues just the opposite. iTunes 11's retirement of the beloved DJ, not to mention another display mode known as Cover Flow (more about that later) are tragic design decisions that have irreversibly degraded my enjoyment of the Apple player, so much so that I reverted back to a previous version of iTunes and haven't looked back since. Reading the 40-page discussion thread here, it's clear I'm not alone.

Making music social

In the early days, iTunes DJ was known as Party Shuffle, but the aim was the same. It provided a way for a group of people in the same room to add their favorite songs to a dynamically generated playlist, an innovation that made online music social in a way that no one had quite achieved before. The feature made it easy for party goers to select individual tracks from an entire music library, to either build a song list on the fly or to add them to a preselected mix. iTunes DJ allowed songs to be played next or added as the last entry in a queue, seamlessly, without a moment of dead air.

Once people got tired of manually adding songs, iTunes DJ, as the feature eventually came to be called, would automatically pick tunes. The feature could be programmed to pseudo-randomly select songs from a particular genre, decade, or playlist, and it could also be tweaked to play higher-rated songs more frequently than lower-rated or unrated titles.

Over time, Apple designers imbued iTunes DJ with new capabilities that made the music player even more dynamic. One of them allowed iPhone-carrying partygoers to have a say in what songs they heard. One setting allowed people to actually place songs into the queue, while a different setting allowed people to vote on which songs got played next. The additions democratized the music-selection process in a way that was never before possible: tunes with more upvotes got placed higher up in the list. To prevent the lone party pooper from injecting a fatal dose of Air Supply or some other musical schlock into an otherwise smoking mix, hosts could restrict the songs that were eligible to be chosen or voted on.

iTunes DJ quickly became my preferred way to listen to music. With a library of 57,000 songs from a variety of genres, it's easy to forget about the Live recording of Calexico downloaded years earlier from the Internet Archive or the Duane Allman anthology a friend gave me as a birthday present that I never got around to listening to.

At the same time, iTunes DJ gave me a way to ensure that the songs I liked enough to rate with four or five stars (about 3,500) never got lost in the mix. Thanks to the development of "smart playlists," iTunes DJ was even advanced enough to always skip certain songs in my collection. Christmas tunes and children's music left behind after a visit by a nephew could easily be filtered out by assigning a one-star rating to them, resulting in a smart playlist that excluded such songs. I would then designate the playlist (called "Just the Good Stuff") as the source iTunes DJ would choose from, rather than from the library as a whole.

The result was a radio station of sorts that I could always rely on to play the songs I loved the most while still throwing plenty of surprises into the mix. The electronic throbbing of The Crystal Method and the haunting melodies of Elliott Smith were never far away, since I gave four and five stars to the best songs by both artists. But those songs went a lot further thanks to iTunes DJ's ability to inject long-neglected songs.

Another cool feature of DJ was the ability to manually add songs to the list, using either an iPhone or an Android device. If I got a sudden hankering to hear The Beatles "She Said She Said," iTunes DJ made it easy for me (or a guest) to manually add it, either as the next song or to be played last in the queue. The feature also made it easy to dish up playlists for special occasions. For example, my friend Pronoy has an undying affinity for 1980s music. Telling iTunes DJ to pick songs from a smart list of tunes from that decade and favor more highly rated tunes has never failed us yet.

The five stages of grief

Tragically, Apple killed off iTunes DJ with no warning or explanation. As with so many losses, this one passed through a variety of stages of grief as I came to terms with what had happened. After scouring every menu item and reading the iTunes user forum mentioned earlier, it soon became clear that DJ hadn't just been moved, it had been killed off. I quickly passed through the denial phase and squarely into the stage of anger. Who were these nameless, faceless designers who had taken away the feature that had brought me so many hours of pleasure? What were the reasons? Would Steve Jobs have ever let something like this happen?

When I entered into the stage known as bargaining, I found plenty of ways to keep myself occupied. iTunes 11 introduced a feature called Up Next. Would it be able to fill the void left by the loss of DJ? After spending hours using the feature, I've reluctantly concluded the answer is a resounding "no."

It's not that Up Next doesn't have some nice touches—it does. The feature makes it easy to load albums, artists, or playlists into a dynamic song list that can then be modified on the fly. The "Just the Good Stuff" playlist that I mentioned earlier will load when I drag it to the Up Next icon, which appears whenever the cursor is placed inside the iTunes LCD.

From there, the songs can be organized and played sequentially or in random order. Up Next gives me an easy-to-use interface to reorder or delete songs on the fly, and it also allows me to add songs from other lists, either to the end of the queue or to be played as soon as the currently playing song ends.

I especially like Up Next when it's displayed through the iTunes Miniplayer. That feature allows me to view the song list even when I'm browsing a website or using another non-iTunes application.

But after hours of Web searches and trial and error, I've been unable to make Up Next do the things I most want it to do: 1) to allow people with iOS devices to vote on or select tunes to be added to the queue and 2) to pseudo-randomly select tunes through my library or a playlist and favor songs that have higher ratings. Not that I haven't tried. Like one disappointed iTunes user suggested, one kluge is to create multiple smart playlists: one with two, three, four, or five stars; the next with three, four, or five stars; a third with four, or five stars; and the last with just five stars. Then create one last smart playlist that incorporates the previous four lists and shuffle it to create a list that weights higher-rated songs and load it into Up Next. As others in the discussion point out, this solution falls woefully short.

"By contrast, and given a large library, what you get with iTunes DJ is a dynamic, constantly evolving menu of music," another iTunes user responded. "You might hear the same song twice in one week and not hear it again for months. The musical menu you enjoy tonight is different from any you've heard before, and different from any you'll hear in the future."

And, of course, this solution does nothing to give partygoers the ability to have a say in what gets played. While iOS and even this trusty Android-based iTunes remote app still allow people to use smartphones to control the volume and choose songs, albums, or artists to be played with iTunes 11, the absence of iTunes DJ has stripped away much of the granular control these apps once had.

In the weeks following the release of iTunes 11, I held out hope that if enough people complained about the demise of the DJ feature, Apple designers might be swayed to bring it back. I couldn't imagine why they wouldn't. If their user surveys found it was too confusing for some, couldn't Apple at least turn it off by default and require people like me to dig deep into menu settings to turn it on? Ultimately, I realized these lines of thinking were still part of the anger and bargaining stages of my loss. It was time to face facts: iTunes DJ was gone for good.

It wasn't the only highly regarded feature to be discarded, either. Much to my amazement, iTunes 11 also eliminated Cover Flow, a view that displayed songs in a playlist as if they were part of an old-fashioned jukebox, like the ones that used to be found in diners. The dazzling eye candy of Cover Flow also struck me as a quintessentially (Steve) Jobsian touch. (In fact, Apple first acquired Cover Flow via an acquisition in 2006; it was originally developed by one of our own Ars forum members.)

But beyond the aesthetics, it made it easy for me to see from across the room the artist, album, and title of a song that I didn't immediately recognize. Displaying the Up Next list in the iTunes mini-player is OK, but it looks decidedly more utilitarian, almost the way I remember Winamp being. It still baffles me why the Cover Flow view was allowed to die.

With time, I came to accept these changes and plot a course of action. I had yet to install iTunes 11 on an older MacBook Pro of mine, so I redesignated it as my laptop for playing music and online movies. After a week with iTunes 10.7, I decided that would be the version I'd to stick with for the foreseeable future. I have since used the older version on a Windows 7 machine for a few months with no problems, either. For those who already installed iTunes 11 and now regret it, Ars Senior Apple Editor Jacqui Cheng has instructions here on how to downgrade.

As a security reporter who regularly exhorts people to install software updates as soon as they're available, my decision to stick with a five-month-old application version still nags at my conscience. Every time I receive a dialog screen asking if I want to upgrade to a newer version of iTunes, I wonder if there are security vulnerabilities in my installation that have since been fixed. Fortunately, I've never heard of an iTunes security bug being exploited in the wild, so this is a risk I'm willing to live with.

There's still the very real possibility that iTunes 10 will one day become so long in the tooth that it will no longer be compatible with the operating systems or hardware I use. I'm guessing I still have a few years to prepare myself for that eventuality. In the meantime, I'm enjoying my iTunes DJ and Cover Flow just fine, thank you very much.