Essential iTunes Tips

iTunes is more than just a program that lets you buy and play music. Part database, part CD authoring tool, iTunes gives you some powerful tools to organize and categorize your digital media collection. Try these tips to get the most out of this software.

The Get Info Menu
One of the best tools in iTunes is the metadata editor found in the Get Info menu. To access this menu, simply highlight a music or video file, right click and choose Get Info. The menu will pop up.

Click on the Info tab and you'll be able to edit details about the song, including title, artist, year and any comments you'd like to add. You can use this last feature to categorize your collection, either by creating comments that are meaningful to you or by using the Grouping field. Want to label all your favorite songs from the summer of 1992? You can do that here. Create a tag called Summer 1992, apply it to several songs, then type Summer 1992 in the iTunes Search field. You'll see all of the songs appear.

If you're ripping an album and want to preserve the order of the songs, be sure to fill out the two track Number fields. The first number is where the song appears on the album, the second number is the total number of tracks.

Changing Artwork
You can use any artwork you like with your digital files. In the Get Info field, click on the Artwork tab. If the file already has artwork, it will appear here. Clicking the Add button lets you browse your computer for the artwork you'd like to use. Clicking Delete removes the selected piece of artwork. You can add multiple pieces of artwork to a file, but you'll only see the first one that you add when you're navigating through iTunes. You can see the others by clicking on the arrow icon that appears above the artwork in the main iTunes window.

Changing Playback Settings
Click on the Options tab in Get Info, and you'll be able to control how and when a song is played. You can adjust the volume of the individual file or change the equalizer preset to make it sound better. Changing the Start Time and Stop time will let you begin or end the file anywhere you like. This is also where you can set ratings for files; clicking inside the Rating box increases or decreases the number of stars. The more stars, the higher you've rated the song.

Burning and Manipulating Files
There are a couple of quirks when it comes to burning CDs with iTunes. The program struggles a bit with very short pieces of audio, typically songs under 1 minute and 30 seconds. Stacking a lot of these together on a CD or beginning or ending a CD playlist with them may cause errors when you burn your discs. To solve this problem, keep longer tracks at the beginning and end of CDs and avoid putting a lot of short files in a row.

Any song burned to CD by iTunes must be at least 8 seconds long. If you try to burn shorter bits of audio, such as sound effects, iTunes will automatically add in the extra time. Your audio will cue normally, but you'll have a few seconds of silence at the end.

If you're trying to edit songs that you've bought through the iTunes Store to create mixes or montages, you'll quickly discover that the MP4 format can't be opened in some audio editing programs. To solve this problem, burn the songs to a blank CD, then reimport them into your audio editing software. You can import the songs directly from the CD, or save them first as MP3 or WAV files with CD ripping programs.