- 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
Options for Playing Multiple Songs
If iTunes is providing the background music for an activity—working, partying, cooking, whatever—you probably want it to keep playing song after song, just as if you were playing a CD. This it does automatically, playing the next song in the list—be it your full library or a subset of it—until it reaches the last song in the list.
You can control how iTunes plays music in several ways: repeating, shuffling, and picking particular songs that you don't want to play.
To set iTunes so it repeats the songs in the song list:
- Click the Repeat button (located in the lower left of the iTunes window) until it is highlighted blue (
Figure 3.16
).
Figure 3.16 Click the Repeat button so it is highlighted in blue if you want the current list of songs to repeat. (Click it so it is gray to turn the repeat function off.)
)
To set iTunes to play all the songs in the song list and then stop:
- Click the Repeat button until it's not highlighted (that is, is gray only).
To set iTunes to play the current song repeatedly:
- Click the Repeat button until it's highlighted blue and displays the number 1 (
Figure 3.17
).
That little number 1 can be hard to see, but once you've seen it, you'll recognize it when you see it again.
Figure 3.17 Click so the Repeat button looks like this—notice the little number 1—to repeat only the current song.
)
To set iTunes to play the songs in the song list in random order:
- Click the Shuffle button so that it's highlighted blue (
Figure 3.18
).
Figure 3.18 Click the Shuffle button so that it's highlighted in blue if you want the songs to play in random order.
)
To specify individual songs that you don't want to play:
- Click to remove the checkmark for each song you don't want to play (
Figure 3.19
).
Figure 3.19 Songs that are not checked won't play.
)
Shuffling Preferences
If you've turned Shuffle on, iTunes' default behavior is to randomly play all the songs appearing in the Detail pane. However, you can tell it to shuffle by album, in which case it plays all the songs from an album in the order they appear before randomly going to another album, and playing all those songs in the order they appear. If you choose to shuffle by groupings, it will play all the songs from a grouping (a collection of the movements of a classical work) before randomly going to another grouping.
You can switch the Shuffle mode on the Playback tab of the Preferences window ( Figure 3.20 ).
)
Figure 3.20 On the Playback tab of the Preferences window you can specify shuffling preferences.
You'll also find a Smart Shuffle slider that allows you to specify how "random" you want the shuffling to be (refer to Figure 3.20). The further to the left you set the slider, the more likely it is that you'll get repeats of songs by the same artist or on the same album. The further right, the less likely to get repeats.