Ten iTunes Tips That Even Steve Jobs Might Not Know Of
iTunes as an application has long gone beyond what its name dictates. Apart from your ‘tunes’, it now manages Movies, TV shows, Applications, Podcasts, Ringtones, iPhones, Games, and is the gateway for your iDevices to access even non-media content like Contacts and Calendars.
Without getting carried away with my ranting, here are a bunch of random tips that should help you navigate better through this ever-growing application. None of these involve any hackery and work with the default settings in iTunes.
Quickly jump to your any artist by rapidly typing the name. Even the first few characters will do. One doesn’t have to have anything selected for this to work. And this will come in handy if you use CoverFlow in fullscreen mode (yeah, like anyone does).
Command+F, as we know it, symbolises search. However, in iTunes it is used to go into full screen mode. Moreover, there is no “Search” in the menu bar so that one could change the shortcut. So one has to stick to the default one, Command+Option+F, which isn’t half bad.
Another shortcut that I like is the 5 second forward/backward skip for the currently playing track. Works with any playlist or track selected. Command+Option+left/right arrow keys. Of course, to skip to the next song/previous song, that would be Command+arrow keys. I have a feeling Steve Jobs knew this one.
iTunes lacks a “Now Playing” playlist. Which means that, for one, you cannot queue up tracks after you have started playing a song. Two, one cannot make iTunes automatically stop playback after playing a single song in the library. The first one I still don’t know what to do with, but for the second one, just type in any random characters in the search field to make the library blank. This will cause iTunes to stop playing after the currently playing track is over.
As inconsistent as the Zoom button is in the rest of the OS, here we have a totally different behaviour. iTunes goes into mini mode on clicking the green Zoom button. To make it conform to normal OS X zoom behaviour, one has to Option+Click the zoom button.
Cover Flow is a great addition to iTunes and I usually have it turned on all the time. However, if one has a lot of applications and documents open, resizing the iTunes window with Coverflow on can be a big pain as it continuously redraws the artwork. In situations like this, Command+drag the window corner which will just drag out the outline. On release, iTunes will resize itself to the new dimensions without putting much strain on resources.
By default, iTunes grabs any thumbnail from within the first few seconds of a video. Now you might want to grab the movie cover from somewhere like impawards.com, but if you are too lazy to do that, then just Ctrl+click the movie while it is playing/paused, and select “Set Poster Frame”. Next time you see it in Front Row or iTunes or your iPhone, the poster frame will be something more meaningful (as opposed to the black screen or studio name that iTunes automatically generates).
With Cover Flow, artwork has become an all important part of managing music. However, going through every album with missing artwork one at a time can be time consuming and ratty. To get iTunes to search for artwork for all those albums with missing artwork at once, just make sure you having nothing selected (just reopen iTunes) in your library, and select “Get Album Artwork” from the Advanced menu in the menu bar. [Ed note: This, however, only works if you have an account on the U.S.A. version of the iTunes Store (or any other country’s which has the the album you want the artwork for. Furthermore, your songs should be properly tagged for this to work. An upcoming post will explain this in more detail.]
Audiobooks are great. If you haven’t tried them yet, don’t wait any longer, especially if you have an iPod/iPhone. However, dragging MP3s or AACs into iTunes, specially if each of those files is a separate chapter is not going to cut it. It will clutter your library and not resume from where you left off. To get the audiobooks into the special Audiobooks section in your library, convert the files to AAC, if they aren’t already, and then rename the files to the .m4b extension. When you import those files into iTunes, they will automatically go into the Audiobooks section. Alternatively, one could use Audialhub to automatically convert and send to files to iTunes as audiobooks.
I don’t really have a 10th tip, and 9 didn’t sound like a wholesome figure, so for the last one I will suggest you look at our iTunes Extenders post to get a better iTunes experience. Also look at the MetaX review, which lets you quickly tag your movies and TV shows.
If you have any questions regarding iTunes, or any special tips to share, please leave them in the comments.
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Forget tip number nine—the new iTunes has a field where you can designate a file to a new media type, including audiobooks. (I have a ton of lectures in iTunes that within two or three clicks automatically appeared in my Audiobooks section by changing Media Type in the Get Info window.) Simple!
Ed September 11th, 2008 at 7:44 pm
Isn’t #4 describing Party Shuffle?
Taras September 11th, 2008 at 10:20 pm
There is no way to make iTunes stop playing a track without having it as the only or last song in the playlist. Party shuffle is sort of a “now playing” playlist, but what happens when you’ve already started playing a track? You have to start that track again in Party shuffle.
Milind Alvares September 11th, 2008 at 10:52 pm
Nice tips. especially tip no1.
renold September 12th, 2008 at 12:36 am
I think Steve knew the Tip #1, on Tuesday’s event he actually typed in an artist’s name but he couldn’t find the artist, he quickly changed his trick.
I liked the Tip #8, I mean its simple and why the heck didn’t I get that idea ??
Azeem September 12th, 2008 at 12:52 pm
He actually typed it in the search field. I’m not taking about that. When you type an artist in the search field, you have to clear the search to go back as well. When you just type without being in the search field, it will just to your artist without tampering with the playlist.
Also Jobs didn’t change the artist name. He was just searching for an artist while in a john mayer album. He had to come out of there to search again.
Milind Alvares September 12th, 2008 at 6:28 pm
My bad
Azeem September 13th, 2008 at 5:25 am
The new iTunes 8 Magnetosphere visualizer is the cat’s meow, too.
Partners in Grime September 15th, 2008 at 6:00 am
Of course, iTunes does not have Now Playing! But, that’s the whole point, why would you need Now Playing, when you have Party Shuffle, which is better as it never stops and you can track which songs have been just played!
det j September 23rd, 2008 at 1:23 am
I know perfectly well how the Party Shuffle works. But what happens when you have already started playing a song in iTunes? I don’t know about you, but I never like to restart playing a song cause that’s just not the way it is. And in Party Shuffle there’s no end. So if you don’t manually stop it, you could potentially be playing for a billion years to come.
Milind Alvares September 23rd, 2008 at 7:33 am
Tip number 4…
iTunes was never meant to have you playing your songs in the liberary. The funktion of selection the next song to play is found in party mode (My version is danish, im not shure what it’s called.) I will agree that it is far from perfect, as it does not que the songs, it just set the next song to be played, and moves the others in the que back
dimse September 23rd, 2008 at 11:11 am
^^ Funny. Steve Jobs always tends to play songs in the Library when he is demoing them. It is but a reflex to just double click a song to listen to it instead of sending it to Party Shuffle.
Milind Alvares September 23rd, 2008 at 12:22 pm
As for how to make it so only one song plays and then no other song plays unless you make it, hold your apple button down and click the check box on the left of any song and it will either check or uncheck all other songs. (Do this in library) When the boxes are all unchecked, it only plays one song,then stops.
Semi_Sweet November 19th, 2008 at 4:01 pm
Also, you don’t have to hold your command or apple key down when you want to forward to next song or go back to last played song. You can simply click the arrow forward or backward.
=D
Semi_Sweet November 19th, 2008 at 4:03 pm
The problem is, that I have a lot of tracks unchecked (which I need so that they don’t transfer to the iPhone). Doing the Command+uncheck option undos all that. Besides, it uses up a lot of resources when you are talking about large libraries…
Milind Alvares November 19th, 2008 at 7:37 pm