Playing Music and More in iTunes
- 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
Once you've added some songs to your library, you'll want to know how to locate specific songs and how to play them.
Of course, you've probably already started poking around in iTunes; it's just too hard not to jump in and start playing your favorite music.
iTunes gives you multiple ways to locate and play songs. You may already know some of them; if you read this chapter, however, you'll likely pick up some new tricks, as well as grasp some nuances of iTunes that may save you confusion and frustration.
We also provide information about things you may want to do while playing—controlling volume, viewing artwork, playing video, and rating songs.
Finally, we end the chapter with coverage of playing music over a network via iTunes sharing capabilities.
Browsing Through Your Library
Just as you navigate through the file system on your computer to get to specific files, you'll need to navigate through the songs in your iTunes library to find the ones you want to listen to. One of the easiest ways to do this is to use the iTunes Browser. When the Browser is hiding, and your library is selected, you see one long list of songs, as in Figure 3.1 . When the Browser is showing, however ( Figure 3.2 ), it's much easier to locate songs by genre, artist, and album.
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Figure 3.1 If you're looking at your library with the Browser hidden, you see one long list of songs.
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Figure 3.2 Once you show the Browser, you can select a specific genre, artist, and album to view.
Ways to hide and show the Browser:
- Click the Browse button at the top right of your iTunes window (refer to Figure 3.1).
- From the Edit menu, choose either Show Browser or Hide Browser. (Or use keyboard shortcuts: Mac users can press Command-B; Windows users can press Ctrl-B.)
The Browser appears in the upper portion of the Detail pane, displaying columns listing genres, artists, and albums (refer to Figure 3.2).
To browse for songs:
- With the Browser showing, click a genre, artist, album, or any combination of these. Only songs that match the item(s) you clicked appear in the song list.
TIPs
- You can select multiple genres, albums, or artists. Shift-click to select contiguous items; Command-click (Mac) or Ctrl-click (Windows) to select items that are not adjacent.
- If you don't care about genre when browsing, you can get rid of that column in the browser: On the General tab of the Preferences window, click to uncheck "Show genre when browsing" (
Figure 3.3
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Figure 3.3 Open the Preferences window, and on the General tab, uncheck "Show genre when browsing" to remove the Genre column from the Browser.
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