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.

Removing Tunes from the Music Library

Not all that glitters is gold, nor are all tunes that are digital good. Sometimes, a song is so bad that it just isn’t worth the hard disk space it consumes.
To remove songs from your Library, ditch them with the following steps:

1. Find the songs you want to delete by browsing or searching.
2. Select the songs you want to trash. They will become highlighted to show you they are selected
3. Press the Delete key. You will be prompted to confirm that you really want to delete the song you have selected.
4. Click Yes to confirm the deletion. You will see another prompt asking if you want the selected files to be moved to your Recycle Bin (Windows) or Trash (Mac).
5. Click Yes. The selected songs will be deleted from your Library, and their song files will be moved to the appropriate trash receptacle on your computer. The next time you empty that receptacle, they will be gone forever.

Of course, songs you delete probably aren’t really gone forever. You can always add them back to the Library again by repeating the same steps you used to place them in there the first time. This assumes that you have a copy somewhere,
such as on a CD or stored in some other location. If you imported the music from your hard disk and had iTunes move the songs files to your iTunes Music folder, your only copy will reside in your iTunes Library, so make sure you have such music backed up before you delete it if you might ever want it again.

Playing Music in Your Music Library

Remember earlier when I said that you use the same listening techniques to listen to music in your Library as you do when listening to a CD? Now it’s time to prove my words.
When you listen to music in your Library, you start by choosing the scope of the music you want to hear. You do this by browsing or searching for music (if you don’t know how to do this, here’s a hint: Read the previous two sections).
After you have the group of songs to which you want to listen showing in the Content pane, use the listening tools you learned about in the previous chapter to listen to your music. For example, you can click Play to play the songs, use the Repeat button to repeat them, sort the Content pane by one of the column headings to change the order in which the songs play, and so on.