Get More Out of iTunes

A Smarter iTunes

iTunes is a great tool for managing your music, and it’s also a wonderful jukebox for listening to music. You can perform various task like ripping and burning CDs and also tweak it to behave it the way you want it to.

Here are some tips and tweaks to get the most out of iTunes.

Ripping CDs

Of course, you can pull the contents from CDs and put the results in your iTunes library. By default, when you insert an audio CD, iTunes launches, displays the CD under the Devices heading in iTunes’ Source list, queries the Internet for the CD’s title and track listings, and then tosses up a dialog box that reads “Would you like to import the CD “name of CD” into your iTunes library?” If you click Yes, the contents of the CD are imported using the Import Settings found in iTunes’ General preference.

If you have a lot of CDs that you’d like to rip—when you’re ripping your massive collection of Grateful Dead discs, for example—click on Edit->Preferences->General, locate the When You Insert a CD pop-up menu, and choose Import and Eject CD. (Other options in this menu include Show CD, Begin Playing, Ask to Import CD, and Import CD.) Choosing Import and Eject CD means iTunes will go about its ripping business without bothering you for anything other than the next disc you’d like to rip.

Before asking iTunes to rip your CD you should consider whether you want tracks imported individually or ganged together into a single track. For example, you might like all the tracks on an audiobook CD to be combined into a single “Disc 1” track, making it easier to navigate the audiobook on an iPod or iPhone. Or, to ensure that a shuffling iPod plays an entire classical work instead of a single movement, combine that work’s component parts into a single unit.

To do that, insert a CD, dismiss the “Would you like to import” dialog box, select the CD in iTunes’ Source list, hold down the Shift key, and select the tracks you’d like to combine into a single track. (The tracks must be in sequence—Tracks 2 – 5, for example. You can’t combine Tracks 1, 3, 6, and 8.) Now choose Advanced -> Join CD Tracks. The tracks will be ripped to a single track using the import settings found in the General preference.

Burning CDs

At one time you could find settings for burning discs in iTunes’ preferences. That’s no longer the case. These settings appear only when you select a playlist and click the Burn Disc button at the bottom of the iTunes window.

In this Burn Settings window you have a variety of options. You can choose a preferred speed—1, 2, 4, 6, 8, 16x and so on as well as Maximum Possible. If you routinely see errors when burning your discs at the Maximum Possible setting, try one of the slower settings as that can help (as can choosing “Use Error Correction When Reading Audio CDs” in the Import Settings window accessed through the General preference).

You also have the option choose between three disc formats. They are:

Audio CD This is the default option, the one you use for burning CDs that you can play in a CD player such as the one attached to your stereo or in your car.

If you’re burning a CD of music that iTunes plays as gapless—The Beatles’ Abbey Road, for example—first select all the tracks in the playlist, press Ctrl-I to produce the Multiple Item Information window, click the Options tab, choose Yes from the Gapless Album pop-up menu, and click OK. Now click Burn Disc at the bottom of the iTunes window.

In the Burn Settings window that appears, ensure that Audio CD is selected and then choose None from the Gap Between Songs pop-up menu. When you do this, songs will play from one to the next without an extra gap. (If the songs include silence at the beginning and/or end, that silence will be maintained, as it’s part of the original track rather than something extra added in the form of a gap.)

If you enable Use Sound Check, the disc will be burned with the Sound Check settings imposed by iTunes. (Sound Check attempts to balance the volume of the various tracks so that they’re more or less equal.)

If you have a CD player that can read track information from CDs and you’d like to view that information when playing the disc, enable the Include CD Text option.

If the playlist contains more tracks than will fit on a single CD, iTunes will offer to split the playlist across multiple discs—filling the first to capacity and then asking for additional discs as needed.

MP3 CD iTunes can burn MP3 CDs. These are CDs that play in some CD players that contain tracks encoded in the MP3 format. The advantage of these discs is that they can hold more than 12 hours of music.

The original tracks must be in the MP3 format (any that aren’t will be skipped when the disc is burned). As with burning audio CDs, if the playlist contains more tracks than can fit on the disc, iTunes will offer to write the remaining tracks to additional discs. The MP3 tracks will appear on the disc organized in folders, with each folder representing an album.

Data CD or DVD Finally, you have the option to burn the contents of your iTunes playlist—audio as well as video—as a data disc. These discs are not playable in any CD or DVD player. Rather, they’re for backing up your data.

This option is, regrettably, routinely overlooked by iTunes users. Many people are under the impression that in order to have a backup of their music, they must burn it as an audio CD. That’s a terribly inefficient way to go as audio CDs create files that eat up around 10MB of storage per minute of stereo audio, even if the original file was a tenth of that size.

Contextual Consolidation

If you have your iTunes library set to not copy media files into the iTunes Music folder when adding to your library, you’re probably familiar with the File -> Library -> Organize Library menu item. You can use this menu option to copy your added media to the iTunes Music folder, which would make it easier to (for example) move your music and media files to a new machine.

At one time, this menu option affected only music files. As of iTunes 9, however, it consolidates all types of media files—at least, it does if you’re using the new iTunes Media folder structure. There’s a little gotcha in this menu item, though: if you want to keep your large video files on another drive, but choose the Organize Library menu item to copy some newly-added music into the iTunes Music folder, iTunes will also copy all of your video files. This is probably not what you want, given you went through the trouble of setting up another drive for those files.

Thankfully, there’s a workaround. iTunes 9 includes a consolidation feature on the contextual menu. Select all of the tracks you’d like to copy into the iTunes Music folder, right-click on one of them, and select Consolidate Tracks from the contextual menu. Used in this manner, iTunes will only consolidate the selected tracks.

With this option in the contextual menu, you can avoid the top-level consolidation option entirely, unless you want to merge everything together, of course.

Editing iTunes Genres

While you can’t edit the list of genres included with iTunes, you can clean up the custom genre entries that find their way to iTunes—either because you entered them or you acquired music that had custom genre tags applied to it. There are a couple of ways to go about this.

The first is to select the Music entry in iTunes 9’s Source list, press Command-B to bring up iTunes’ Browser, and if the Genres list isn’t present, choose View -> Column Browser -> Genres. Find a custom genre that you’d like to remove and select it. On the right side of the iTunes window you’ll see all the tracks that bear this genre tag. Select all of them and press Ctrl-I. After confirming that you really do want to edit information for multiple items, you’ll see the Multiple Item Information window. From the Genre menu, select a new genre and click on OK. iTunes will apply the newly selected genre and the old custom genre will disappear from iTunes.

About Sorting

In regard to using custom genres to sort music, there’s a better way. And that better way is the Comments tag. This is a catch-all place for entering any kind of information you like and can be edited for single- as well as multiple tracks. If you want to sort some music by mood, for example, just use this field for words such as “gloomy,” “perky,” “dull,” or any other descriptive term that suits you. And unlike the Genres tag, it doesn’t include a lot of pre-defined entries that you can’t remove.

True, while you can’t specifically sort tracks by Comments on an iPod as you can with Genres, we were given the power to create playlists for this kind of thing. And iTunes does allow you to sort by Comments. Just right-click on iTunes’ column heading and choose Comment. Click the Comment heading and you’re set. And to easily create playlists based on comments, just use iTunes’ Search field to enter your comment keyword, select everything that turns up, choose File -> New Playlist From Selection, and sync that playlist to your iPod.

Find Only Exact Duplicates

Here’s a very simple iTunes hint that may come in very handy for those of you who may have duplicate song issues in iTunes. As you’re probably aware, iTunes includes a tool to help find the duplicates; just select File -> Show Duplicates, and iTunes will create a list of all the songs it believes are duplicates.

The only problem with this feature is that it’s quite liberal in deciding what is, and is not, a duplicate. As a result, the list of potential duplicates can wind up being very large—especially if you have a number of different versions of the same song by the same artist.

So here’s the trick…the Shift key. Hold it down, then select File, and notice that Show Duplicates has changed to Show Exact Duplicates. The resulting list will be much shorter, as it will only select exact duplicates.

Pick the Perfect View Options

When you want to examine your iTunes library, you have a choice of different views—ways to display the content. You can choose a different view for each part of your iTunes library, whether it be for the sub-libraries (such as Music, Movies, TV Shows, or Audiobooks) or for playlists, and iTunes remembers these views for each part of its display. Here’s a look at the three different views, when you might want to use them, and which options each one offers.

List view

The first of the three views available is List view. This is the best way to see detailed information about your music and other content, because each track or item displays on its own line with a number of columns of information about it. To enter List view, click the leftmost part of the triple View button (located at the top of the iTunes window, to the left of the Search field), or press Ctrl-Shift-3. By default, List view displays only a few columns for music: Name, Time, Artist, Album, Genre, Rating, and Play count. (Other columns display for movies, TV shows, audiobooks, or podcasts.)

You can display additional columns by choosing View -> View Options and checking the columns you want to see, or by right-clicking on any column header and choosing a column from the contextual menu. Each of these columns contains tag information that was either included with music you purchased, downloaded from the Gracenote database when you ripped CDs, or that you added manually. You may want to display other columns, such as Year, BPM, or composer (for music), or other specific columns for other types of content. You can then drag the columns to reorder them as you prefer.

You can sort your music by the information in any of these columns by clicking in the column headers—for example, the Date Added column to see the items you’ve most recently added to your library—and if you click the Album column it toggles between Album, Album By Artist, and Album By Year.

In List view you can also display a browser (View -> Show Column Browser), and can choose to have it show at the top or the side of your list as well as choose which columns it displays. The browser lets you narrow down what iTunes displays. For example, if you want to see only your jazz tracks, click Jazz in the Genres section of the browser; you can then see those artists who are only in that genre, and see all their music by clicking one of their names.

List view is the default view for any playlists you make, but you can choose one of the other two views by clicking the View button, or using one of the View menu items.

Grid view

Grid view is the default for the different iTunes libraries: Music, Movies, TV Shows, Podcasts, Audiobooks, and iTunes U. If you’ve never launched iTunes before, or if you’ve never changed views, this is what you’ll see in each of those libraries. Unlike List view, where you see a lot of text, Grid view shows big icons of each item (album, movie, podcast, and so on) on a plain background. (By default, this is a white background, but you can change it to black. Choose iTunes -> Preferences, then, from the Grid View pop-up menu, change Light to Dark.)

Grid view is good if you want to see an overview of your content. Each grouping shows as one icon, so if you have a single track from an album and an entire album, each will show as one icon. The same is true for audiobooks, TV shows, and podcasts; if you have one or more chapter/part/episode, each group will have its own icon.

You can sort your Grid view content by choosing View -> Grid View, then choosing Albums, Artists, Genres or Composers; iTunes will sort according to those tags. (Those choices are for music; choices are different for other types of content.) If you choose to sort by, say, Artist, all items by one artist will be hidden beneath a single icon; drag your cursor over that icon to see different items.

You can also display a header by choosing View -> Grid View -> Show Header, which provides a button bar where you can choose sort criteria, and a slider you can use to change the size of the icons.

With Grid view, you can play items easily. Just move your cursor over an icon and click Play content type when that label displays. You can’t stop playback the same way, though; you’ll have to click the Pause button at the top-left of the iTunes window.

When you double-click an item in Grid view, iTunes goes “into” that item, and opens its contents in a List view window. You can explore the tracks that display, or play them, and to return to Grid view, click All Albums, at the top left of the Grid view header.

Cover Flow view

The third view in iTunes is Cover Flow, which you might be familiar with from the Finder or from your iPod or iPhone. Cover Flow shows items’ artwork against a black background in the top part of the iTunes window, with a list section below it. You can change the size of the icons by dragging the horizontal separator between the scroll bar and the list headers. You can scroll horizontally through your content or click a cover that you see. Whether you scroll or click, iTunes moves the list to display whichever item is front and center (with the item’s name below it).

You can go into a full-screen mode by clicking the square icon with arrows pointing away from each other on the diagonal at the right of the Cover Flow section. When in this mode, you can start and pause playback, change volume, and scroll through albums and other types of content in other libraries with nothing on your screen other than the artwork in Cover Flow against a black background.

Choosing the right view

Depending on which type of content you’re looking at, you may want to use a different view. For movies and audiobooks, Grid view is great, because items in these libraries usually don’t contain many files. A movie as a Grid view icon is easier to see than in, say, List view, and for audiobooks, each Grid view icon hides the multiple files for a book.

For music, depending on the size of your library and the number of albums, any of them can work, but if you’re sorting or searching for music, List view is most practical. Grid view is good if you’re visual; if you like to choose what music to play by looking at album art. Some people like Cover Flow view, because you can “flip through” your music easily, but I find that with a large library it can be unwieldy.

Remember that you can change views whenever you want, and you can apply different views to each part of your iTunes library, and to each individual playlist. So try them all out and see which is best for your needs.