iPod and iTunes Starter Kit (2nd Edition)

What iTunes has in common with its much less sophisticated cousins the boom box and the standard CD player is the ability to play audio CDs. Although the basic function is the same, iTunes has several tricks in its bag to make listening even better. So, grab a CD and give it a try:

That's it. You now know everything you need to listen to an audio CD. However, there are lots more ways to control the tunes, some of which are in the following list:

• Double-click any song to play it. When you do that, the speaker icon will jump to the song on which you double-clicked and it will play.

  Note

  Using the Volume slider within iTunes only changes the volume of iTunes relative to your system's volume. If you can't make the music loud or quiet enough, check your system volume level.

• When a song is playing and you click and hold the Rewind or Fast Forward button down, the song will rewind or fast forward until you release the button.

• If a song is selected and you press, but don't hold down, the Rewind or Fast Forward button, the previous or next song, respectively, will be selected. You can also choose Controls, Next Song or Controls, Previous Song to move to the next or the previous song. And for yet another method to do the same thing, use the Ctrl+right arrow and Ctrl+left arrow keys on a Windows PC or the +right arrow and +left arrow keys on a Mac to move to the next or previous song.

• You can set a default action for iTunes to perform each time you insert a CD into your computer. You do this with the iTunes Preferences dialog box, which you will be using throughout this part of the book. Choose Edit, Preferences (Windows) or iTunes, Preferences (Mac). The Preferences dialog box will appear. The Preferences dialog box has several panes that you access by clicking the related tab (Windows) or icon (Mac). Click the General tab (Windows) or General icon (Mac). Use the On CD Insert dropdown list to choose the default action iTunes should perform when it recognizes an audio CD. Show Songs just displays the list of tracks on the CD. Begin Playing starts playing the CD as soon as it is mounted on your computer (this does the same thing as clicking the Play button). Import Songs adds the selected songs on the CD to your Library. Import Songs and Eject does the same thing as Import Songs, but it ejects the CD when all its tracks have been added to your Library. (You'll see the value of the last two settings in the next chapter.)

  Tip

  Yet another way to eject a disc is to point to it with the cursor, open its contextual menu, and choose Eject. On Windows machines, you right-click to open this menu. On Macs, you Ctrl-click with a single-button mouse or right-click if you have a two-button mouse (which hopefully you do).

• To remove a CD from your computer, select it in the Source List and choose Controls, Eject Disc, press Ctrl+E (Windows) or +E (Macintosh), or click the Eject button located in the lower-right corner of the iTunes window.

Viewing Information While Listening to Tunes

You can view different information in the Information window, such as the name, artist, and album of the currently playing song. When you first view this window, it contains a timeline bar that represents the total length of the song being played (see Figure 13.3). A black diamond indicates the relative position of the music you are hearing at any point in time compared to the total length of the song.

Note

At the top of the Information window is a line of text. What appears here changes over time; it automatically rotates between the artist's name, album name, and name of the song currently playing. You can freeze this display on a specific attribute, such as song name, by clicking the text. Each time you click, the information will change from album to artist to song name. Whichever one you last clicked on will remain showing in the window.

Underneath the album, artist, and song name line is the time information. This can display elapsed time (the amount of time a song has been playing), remaining time (the amount of time a song has left), or total time (the song's total length). Unlike the name information, this display does not rotate among these values. You can set the value being displayed by clicking the time being displayed; each time you click, a different time value will be shown until you have rotated among all three values.

Note

Finally, if you click the Change Display button, the display will become a graphical representation of the volume levels at various frequency groups (see Figure 13.4). You can return to the title information by clicking the button again.

Controlling the Tunes

Playing an audio CD from start to finish and controlling the volume are useful and required tasks, but with iTunes you can take control of your music so that you hear only what you want to hear, in the order in which you want to hear it. In the following sections, you'll see how iTunes lets you take control of your tunes. For example, in the next section, you'll learn how to choose the songs you want to hear.

Choosing the Songs You Hear

Let's face it, you probably don't like every song on a CD no matter how much you like the CD on the whole. With iTunes, you can choose the songs that play when you play the CD. You can cause a song to be skipped by unchecking the Select check box (see Figure 13.5). When the CD plays, it will skip over every song whose Select check box is unchecked.

Tip

To have iTunes include and thus play the song again the next time you play the CD, simply check its Select check box.

Choosing the Order in Which Songs Play

iTunes determines the order in which songs play by the order in which they are shown in the Content pane, starting from the top of the pane and moving to the bottom. By default, songs are listed and therefore play in the order they appear on the CD, from track 1 to the last track on the disc. However, you can make songs on a CD play in any order you choose. You have a couple ways to do this.

You can change the order in which songs are listed in the Content pane (and thus the order in which they play) by dragging the songs up or down in the pane (see Figure 13.6). When you change the order of the songs in the pane, you change the order in which they will play.

You can also change the order of tracks by sorting the Content pane by the various attributes shown, such as Song Name, Time, Artist, and so on. You can do this by clicking the column heading of the attribute by which you want to sort the list. When you do so, the tracks will be sorted by that column (see Figure 13.7). To change the direction of the sort (from ascending to descending or from descending to ascending), click the Sort Order triangle; the sort direction will be reversed, and the songs will be reordered accordingly. Just like when you manually move songs around, they will play in the order in which they are listed in the pane.

The column by which the pane is sorted is indicated by the column heading being highlighted in bluethis defaults to the first column, which is the track number. (When a CD is the source, the Track Number column is always the first or leftmost column in the Content pane, and it's unlabeled.) When you select a different column, its heading becomes blue to show that it is the current sort column.

Tip

You can also tell which column is the sort column as well as the direction of the sort by the Sort Order triangle. It only appears in the sort column. When the triangle is pointing down, the sort is descending. When the triangle is pointing up, the sort is ascending.

Getting Random

For a little variety, you can have iTunes play songs in a random order. This feature is called Shuffle. To use this feature, click the Shuffle button located at the bottom of the window (second one from the left) or choose Controls, Shuffle. As you play music, songs will be selected in a random fashion regardless of how they are listed in the window. Just to add a bit of confusion for you, the order in which the songs are listed in the window doesn't change as you might expect. This is the one case in which the order of the songs in the window is not the order in which they play. The only way you can tell that the Shuffle feature is active is that the Shuffle button will be highlighted.

Note

To return the CD to its natural order, click the Shuffle button again or choose Controls, Shuffle.

Repeating Tracks

Sometimes, you just can't get enough. In that case, you can set iTunes to repeat an entire CD once or to repeat only a single song. To repeat your tunes, check out these pointers:

• To have iTunes repeat an entire CD, choose Controls, Repeat All or click the Repeat button located at the bottom of the window (third one from the left). The Repeat button will become highlighted to show you that it is active, and the CD will repeat when you play it.

  Note

  If you used the menu to shuffle a disc, you will notice that the Shuffle command on the menu has a check mark next to it. This check mark shows you that the command is currently active. When it isn't, the check mark will disappear. This is true of other settings as well, such as Repeat.

• To repeat only the selected song, choose Controls, Repeat One or click the Repeat button a second time. A "1" will appear on the Repeat button to indicate that only the current song will be repeated.

• To turn off the repeat function, choose Controls, Repeat Off or click the Repeat button until it is no longer highlighted in blue.

Controlling iTunes from the Desktop

Using the controls you have seen so far is fine, but you might not want to have the iTunes window foremost all the time. You must be able to see iTunes to control it, right? Wrong!

Tip

Controlling iTunes from the Windows System Tray

When iTunes is running on a Windows machine, an iTunes icon is displayed in the System Tray. Right-click this icon and you will see an iTunes menu (see Figure 13.8). At the top of the menu, you will see information about the song that is playing (if iTunes is paused, this text will be grayed out). You can use the commands on this menu just as you can from within iTunes itself. For example, you can skip to the next song by choosing Next Song. After you choose a command, you can move off the menu and it will disappear. This is a handy way to control iTunes without having to make its window active or even show it on your desktop.

If you don't want the iTunes icon to appear in the System Tray for some reason, you can remove it. Open the iTunes Preferences dialog box (Ctrl+,), click the Advanced tab, uncheck the Show iTunes Icon in System Tray check box, and click OK. The icon will no longer appear in your System Tray.

Tip

Controlling iTunes from the Mac's Dock

The iTunes icon on the Mac OS X enables you to control iTunes when it is in the background, when its window is minimized, or when the application is hidden. When you Ctrl-click the iTunes Dock icon (or right-click if you have a two-button mouse), the iTunes menu will appear (see Figure 13.9). At the top of this menu, you will see information about the song currently playing (the text is grayed out if iTunes is paused). You control iTunes by choosing a command on this menu. For example, you can pause the music by choosing Pause. After you choose a command, the menu will disappear, and you can get back to what you were doing.