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 A). 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 B). 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 blue—this 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.
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.

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). When the CD plays, it will skip over every song whose check box is unchecked.
To have iTunes include and thus play the song again the next time you play the CD, simply check the Selected check box.

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). 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. 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 text; each time you click, a different time value will be shown until you have rotated among all three values.
Finally, if you click the Change Display button, the display will become a graphical representation of the volume levels at various frequency groups. You can return to the title information by clicking the button again.

Lots more ways to control the tunes

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.
• 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 not playing or a song is playing but you single-click (but don’t hold the button 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.
• 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.

Listening to an Audio CD with iTunes

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:

1. Open iTunes.
2. Insert an audio CD into your computer. In a moment, the CD will be mounted on your computer, and it will appear and be selected in the Source List By default, iTunes will automatically connect to the Internet and attempt to identify the CD you have inserted. If it finds it, it will display the CD’s information, including CD name, track names, times, artist, and genre, in the Content pane (in Figure, you can see the CD’s information has been found). This is really cool because iTunes does most of the labeling work for you; this comes in very handy when you want to search or browse for music to create playlists or just to listen to specific tracks. If iTunes finds information for a CD, it remembers that information and displays it each time you insert the CD. At the bottom of the iTunes window is the Source Information display. This will show you the total number of songs on the CD, how long it plays, and the total disc space used. If the CD’s information isn’t located, you can add it yourself
3. To play the CD, do any of the following: click the Play button in the top-left corner of the window (when a CD is playing, this becomes the Pause button), choose Controls, Play, or press the spacebar. The CD will begin to play. As a song plays, a speaker icon appears next to it in the Content pane to indicate it is the current song, and information about that song appears in the Information window
4. Control the volume of the sound by dragging the Volume slider to the left to turn it down or to the right to turn it up. You can also control the volume by choosing Controls, Volume Up or Controls, Volume Down. For yet another option, use the Ctrl+up arrow and Ctrl+down arrow keys on Windows PCs or the „+up arrow and „+down arrow keys on Macs to set the volume from the keyboard. To mute the sound, choose Controls, Mute. On Windows PCs you can press Ctrl+Alt+down arrow, whereas on Macs you can press Option+„+down arrow to do the same thing.
5. To pause a song, click the Pause button, choose Controls, Pause, or press the spacebar.