Customizing the Content Pane

You have a number of ways to customize the columns (tags) that appear in the Content pane. What’s more, you can customize the Content pane for each source. The customization you have done for a source (such as a CD or playlist) is remembered and used each time you view that source. You can choose the tags (columns) that are shown for a source by using the following steps:

1. Select the source whose Content pane you want to customize. Its contents will appear in the Content pane.


2. Choose Edit, View Options or press Ctrl+J (Windows) or „+J (Mac). You will see the View Options dialog box. At the top of the dialog box, you see the source for which you are configuring the Content pane. (It is a playlist called Johnny Cash.) You also see all the available columns that can be displayed. If a column’s check box is checked, that column will be displayed; otherwise, it won’t be shown.

3. Check the check boxes next to the columns you want to see.
4. Uncheck the check boxes next to the columns you don’t want to see.
5. Click OK. When you return to the Content pane, only the columns you selected will be shown.
If you can’t see all the columns being displayed, use the horizontal scrollbar to scroll in the Content pane. You can also use the vertical scroll bar to move up and down in the Content pane.

Adding Artwork for Songs in iPod

You might want to associate artwork with a song. For example, if a song doesn’t have album art associated with it, you can add the art yourself. Or, you might want to add the artist’s picture or some other meaningful graphic to the song. You can add one or more pieces of art to songs by using the following steps:

1. Prepare the artwork you are going to associate with a song. You can use graphics in the usual formats, such as JPG, TIFF, GIF, and so on.
2. Select the song with which you want to associate the artwork.
3. Open the Info window and then click the Artwork tab. If the selected song has artwork with it, you will see it in the Artwork pane. You can add multiple images for the same song. You can use the slider under the image box to change the size of the previews you see in the window. Drag the slider to the right to make the image larger or to the left to make it smaller. This doesn’t change the image; instead, it only impacts the size of the image as you currently see it in the Info window. This is especially useful when you associate lots of images with a song because you can see them all at the same time.
4. Click Add. A dialog box that enables you to choose an image will appear.
5. Move to and select the image you want to associate with the song.
6. Click Open (Windows) or Choose (Mac). The image will be added to the window.
7. Continue adding images to the Artwork pane until you have added all the images for a song. The default image for a song is the one on the left of the image box.
8. To change the order of the images, drag them in the image box.
9. Click OK. The window will close and the images will be saved with the song.

Viewing Album Artwork in iPod

To view a song’s artwork, do one of the following:
■ Click the Artwork button located under the Source list. The Artwork pane will appear and display the artwork associated with either the currently playing song or the currently selected song. At the top of the artwork, you will see Selected Song, which indicates you are viewing the artwork associated with the selected song, or Now Playing, which indicates you are viewing artwork associated with the song currently playing.
■ Double-click the artwork to see a larger version in a separate window. The title of the window will be the name of the song the artwork is associated with.
■ To choose between viewing artwork associated with the selected song or the song currently playing, click the text at the top of the Artwork pane. The artwork will change to the other option (for example, if you click Playing, it will become Selected Song), and you will see the artwork for that song.
■ If you choose the Now Playing option, the artwork will change in the Artwork pane as the next song begins playing (unless, of course, the songs use the same artwork).
■ If the song has more than one piece of artwork associated with it, click the arrows that appear at the top of the pane to see each piece of art.

Ratings Songs in the Content Pane

You can also rate songs in the Content pane. To do so, follow these steps:

1. Scroll in the Content pane until you see the My Rating column.
2. Select the song you want to rate. Dots will appear in the My Rating column for that song.
3. Click the dot representing the number of stars you want to give the song. The dots up to and including the one on which you clicked will become stars.

Configuring Song Options in the Info Window

You can configure a song’s options in the Info window by performing the following steps:

1. Select the song whose options you want to set.
2. Open the Info window.
3. Click the Options tab
4. To change the song’s relative volume, drag the Volume Adjustment slider to the left to make the song quieter or to the right to make it louder.
5. To rate the song, click the dot representing the number of stars you want to give the song in the My Rating field. For example, to give the song three stars, click the center (third) dot. Stars will appear up to the point at which you click. In other words, before you click you’ll see a dot. After you click a dot, it becomes a star.
6. To set a start time, check the Start Time check box and enter a time in the format minutes:seconds. When you play the song, it will start playing at the time you enter. When you set a start or stop time, you don’t change the song file in any way. You can play the whole song again by unchecking the Start Time or Stop Time check box.
7. To set a stop time, check the Stop Time check box and enter a time in the format minutes:seconds. When you play the song, it will stop playing at the time you enter.
8. Click OK. The window will close and your changes will be saved.

Configuring a Song’s Options

You can configure a number of options for the songs in your Library, including the following:
■ Relative Volume—You can change a song’s relative volume so that it is either louder or quieter than “normal.” This is useful if you like to listen to songs that are recorded at a variety of volume levels so that the volume remains somewhat similar as you move from song to song.
■ Equalizer Preset—You can use the iTunes Equalizer to configure the relative volume of sound frequencies.
■ My Rating—You can give tunes a rating from one to five stars. You can use ratings in various ways, such as to create criteria for playlists (such as include only my five-star songs) or to sort the Content pane.
■ Start and Stop Time—You can set songs to start or stop at certain points in the track. This can be useful if you don’t want to hear all of a track, such as when a song has an introduction that you don’t want to hear each time the song plays.

Labeling a Song in the Content Pane

You can also edit tags within the Content pane:
1. Click once on a song to select it.
2. Click once on the tag you want to edit. The tag will become highlighted to show that it is ready to be edited (see Figure)
3. Type the new information.
4. Press Enter (Windows) or Return (Mac). The changes you made will be saved.

Labeling Multiple Songs at the Same Time

You can change some tags, such as Genre, for a group of songs at the same time. This can be a faster way to enter data because you can change multiple songs at the same time. Here are the steps to follow:

1. Select the songs whose data you want to change.
2. Open the Info window. You’ll be prompted to confirm that you want to change the information for a group of songs.
3. Click Yes to clear the prompt. The Multiple Song Information window will appear (see Figure). The information and tools in this window work in the same way as they do for individual songs. The difference is that the information and settings apply to all the songs you have selected.
4. Enter data in the fields, make changes to existing data, or use the other tools to configure the songs you have selected. As you change information, the check box next to the tag will become checked to show that you are changing that data for all the selected songs.
5. When you are done making changes, click OK. The window will close and the changes you made will be saved.

Labeling Your Music

Typically, if you have imported a CD or purchased music from the iTunes Music Store, you shouldn’t change most of the data that came from the source, such as name, artist, album, track number, and so on. Occasionally, a CD’s information will come in incorrect (such as a misspelling in the artist’s name); you’ll probably want to fix such mistakes. Also, you can certainly add data in those fields that are empty. There are a couple of places in which you can change a song’s tags. You can use the Info window to change a song’s tags, as you can see in the following steps:

1. Open the Info window for the song whose information you want to change.
2. Click the Info tag. The Info pane will appear.
3. Enter or change the information shown in the various fields. For example, you can change the song’s name or artist. Or you might want to add comments about the song in the Comments box. One of the more useful tags is Genre. This can be used for browsing and also in playlists.
4. To change a song’s genre, select the new genre on the Genre menu.
5. When you are done entering or changing tags, click OK. The Info window will close, and any changes you made will be saved.

Viewing Tags in the Info Window

The Info window is probably the only area in which you haven’t seen tags yet. To view the Info window, select a song in your Library and choose File, Get Info or press Ctrl+I (Windows) or „+I (Mac). The Info window will appear. This window has four panes that you will be using throughout the rest of this chapter. The Summary pane provides a summary view of the song’s information, starting at the top with any album art associated with the song and including its name, artist, and album. In the center part of the pane, you see the data iTunes manages (you can view this data, but you can’t change it). At the bottom of the pane, you can see the path to the song’s file on your computer. When you click the Info tab, you will see the tags that you can change. You’ll learn how to change this data in the next section. The other two panes of the window, Options and Artwork, are used to configure specific aspects of a song (again, we’ll get to these topics in a few pages). You can view information for other songs without closing the window. Click Next to move to the next song in the source you are viewing (such as your Library) or Previous to move to the previous song. When you do, that song’s information will be displayed in the Info window.
To close the window, click OK.

Viewing Tags in the Browser

When you view the Browser, you see the genre, artist, and album tags associated with the songs you are browsing

Understanding Song Tags and Knowing Why You Should Care About Them

You saw how you can browse your iTunes music collected by genre, artist, and album. This makes finding music fast and easy, even if you have thousands of songs in your Library. This functionality is enabled because each song in your Library has information—also called tags—that categorizes and identifies those songs for you. Genre, artist, and album are just three of the possible tags for each song in iTunes. There are many more items of information that iTunes manages.
These types of data fall into two groups: data that iTunes assigns for you and that you can’t change, and data that you or iTunes assigns and that you can change.
Data that iTunes assigns and that you can view but can’t change include the following:

■ Kind—The type of file the song is, such as AAC, MP3, and so on.
■ Size—The amount of disk space required to store the song.
■ Bit Rate—The quality level at which the song was encoded. Larger numbers, such as 128Kbps, are better.
■ Sample Rate—The rate at which the music was sampled when it was captured.
■ Date Modified—The date on which the song file was last changed.
■ Play Count—The number of times the song has been played.
■ Last Played—The last time the song was played.
■ Profile—A categorization of the song’s complexity.
■ Format—The format in which the song was encoded, such as MPEG-1, Layer 3, and so on.
■ Channels—Whether the track is stereo or mono.
■ Encoded With—The tools used to encode the song, such as iTunes, QuickTime, and so on.
■ ID3 Tag—Data formatted according to a set of specifications. If a song’s data has been formatted with this specification, the ID3 version number will be shown
■ Purchase By and Account Name—Information that identifies who purchased the music from the iTunes Music Store and what account was used.
■ Where—A path to the song’s file on your computer along with the file’s name.
Data collected for songs that you can change includes the following:
■ Name—The name of the song.
■ Artist—The person who performs the song.
■ Album—The name of the album from which the song comes.
■ Grouping—A label you can assign to group songs together in some fashion.
■ Composer—The person who is credited with writing the song.
■ Comments—A free-form text field in which you can make comments about a song.
■ Genre—A song’s musical genre, such as jazz or classical.
■ Year—The year the song was created.
■ Track Number—The song’s position on the CD from which it came, such as “2 of 12.”
■ Disc number—The number of the CD. This is meaningful only for multiple CD sets.
■ BPM—The song’s beats per minute.
■ Compilation—An indicator of whether the song is part of a compilation in the Library, such as coming from a CD that is stored in the Library.

When you add a song to your Library, iTunes will add as much of this data as it can find for each song. However, you can add or change the data in the previous list.
So, why should you care about all this data? There are a couple of reasons.
The first is that, if you already know how to browse and search your Library, this data can be used to find music in which you are interested. That reason alone should be enough to convince you that these types of data are important to you.
The second reason is, when it comes time to create playlists, you can use song tags to determine which songs are included in your playlists. For example, you can configure a playlist to include the last 25 songs you have played from the Jazz genre. This is just a basic example—you can get much more sophisticated than that. In fact, you can include lots of different combinations of these types of data as criteria in playlists to create very interesting sets of music to listen to.