- Browsing Through Your Library
- Searching for Songs
- Sorting Songs
- Playing and Pausing Songs
- Moving Around in a Song
- Options for Playing Multiple Songs
- Accessing and Playing Podcasts
- Controlling Volume
- Listening to Radio Streams
- Viewing Artwork
- Accessing and Playing Video
- Rating Songs
- Sharing Your Music
- Playing Music from Others' Libraries
- Dealing with Firewalls
This chapter is from the book
This chapter is from the book
This chapter is from the book
Playing and Pausing Songs
Once the songs you want to play are visible in your song list, you have numerous ways to play them. (You've surely discovered some of them by now.)
It gets a little tricky, however, depending on whether or not there's a current song. A current song is one that is playing or was just playing; it has a speaker icon next to it ( Figure 3.8 ).
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Figure 3.8 Use different techniques to play depending on whether songs are selected or current. In this example, Maxwell's Silver Hammer is the current song; press the space bar (or click the Play button or choose Controls > Play) to play it. Press Return (Mac) or Enter (Windows) to play Come Together, the selected song. Double-click to play any song even if it's not selected or current, such as Oh! Darling.
Ways to play songs:
- Press the Play button (
Figure 3.9
) to play the current song.
Figure 3.9 Click the Play button to play the current song (the one with the speaker icon) or the selected song if no song is current, or the first song in the song list if no song is current or selected.
- If there's no current song, press the Play button to play whatever song is selected or to play the first song in the list, if nothing is selected.
- Double-click any song's line to play it.
- Click a song's line in the song list to select it, and press the Return key (Mac) or Enter key (Windows) on your keyboard.
- Double-click a line in the Browser pane to put the songs in that category in the song list and start playing the first of these.
)
The song that plays becomes the current song; the speaker icon appears next to it with lines emanating from the speaker.
As the song plays, the diamond in the progress bar moves to the right. The elapsed time appears on the left side of the bar in the Status display, and the remaining time appears on the right side.
To pause a song:
- Click the Pause button, the button with the parallel lines (
Figure 3.10
).
Figure 3.10 Click the Pause button to pause playback of the current song. (When you click the Play button again, playback resumes where you've stopped it.)
)
The speaker icon next to the playing song changes so that there are no sound waves emanating from the speaker ( Figure 3.11 ). This song is still the current song, however.
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Figure 3.11 Notice that the speaker icon no longer has lines emanating from it, indicating that this song is paused. It still shows that the song is current, however.
Ways to make the next or previous song current:
- Press the right or left arrow key.
- From the Controls menu, choose Next Song or Previous Song.
- Click the Skip Forward or Skip Backward button (
Figure 3.12
).
The speaker icon appears to the left of the new current song. If iTunes is playing a song at the time you do any of the above, the new current song begins playing from the beginning; otherwise, use one of the previously described methods to play the new current song.
Figure 3.12 Click the Skip Forward button to make the next song in the list the current song. (Or click the Skip Backward button, the one with the double arrows pointing left, to make the previous song in the list the current song. You may have to click twice if the song is playing.)
)
What's Selected Isn't Necessarily What Plays
It can be confusing that one song can be selected (highlighted) while a different song is "current" (has the speaker icon next to it); see Figure 3.8.
Since the highlighting is so much more prominent than the speaker icon, one might think that clicking the Play button (or choosing Controls > Play or pressing the spacebar) would play the selected song. Not so: The song that gets played is the one that has the speaker icon next to it.
You can, however, make the selected song and the current song one-and-the-same: From the File menu, choose Show Current Song ( Figure 3.13 ) to select the current song. Or you can click the little curving-arrow button that shows on the right side of the Status display. This is particularly useful when you've been browsing around your iTunes library while listening to a song and you want to get back to that song.
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Figure 3.13 From the File menu, choose Show Current Song to select the current song.
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