As cool as the Genius is, sometimes you'll need a little more manual control over what adopts your automatically generated music mixes. That's where Smart Playlists rise to the occasion. Once you give it some guidelines, a good Playlist can go sniffing through your music library and come up with its own mix. A Smart Playlist even keeps tabs on the music that comes and goes from your library and adjusts itself depending on that.
You might tell one Smart Playlist to put together 45 minutes' worth of songs that you've rated higher than four stars but rarely pay attention to, and another to play your most-often-played songs from the 1980s. The Smart Playlists you create are limited only by your imagination.
To start a Smart Playlist, press Ctrl+Alt+N or choose File and then New Smart Playlist. A Smart Playlist box opens: It sports a purple gear-shaped icon alongside its name in the Source list. Give iTunes detailed instructions about what you want to hear. You can pick a few artists you prefer and have iTunes leave from the ones you're not in the mood for, pluck songs that only fall within a certain genre or year, and so on. To add multiple, cumulative criteria, click the plus button.
Turn on the "Live updating" checkbox. This tells iTunes to keep the playlist updated as your collection, ratings, and play count change. To edit a current Smart Playlist, right-click the playlist's name. Then choose Edit Smart Playlist.
A Smart Playlist is a dialogue between you and iTunes: You tell it what you need in as much detail as you want, and the program whips up a playlist based on your instructions. You can even instruct a good Playlist to pull tracks from your current Genius playlist. Just click the + button to add a preference, choose Playlist as the second criteria, and select Genius from the list of available playlists.
There's Home Sharing and then there's home, sharing. Many families have just one computer. If everyone's utilizing the same copy of iTunes, you soon get the Wiggles bumping up against Wu-Tang Clan if you have iTunes shuffling the background music tracks, or whenever you autosync multiple iPads. Wouldn't it be great if everyone were built with a personal iTunes library to possess and to hold, to sync and also to shuffle - separately? Absolutely. To use multiple iTunes libraries, follow these steps:
Quit iTunes. Hold down the Shift key on your PC or Mac keyboard and launch iTunes. In the box that pops up, click Create Library. Give it a name, like "Tiffany's Music" or "Songs My Wife Hates." iTunes reveals, but with an empty library. If you possess a bunch of music in your main library that you want to move over to this one, choose File?"Add to Library".
Visit the music you want and add it. When the songs are in your original library, they're probably in Music, then iTunes, then iTunes Media and then Music, in folders sorted by artist name. Pick the files you want to add.To change between libraries, hold down the Shift (Option) key when you begin iTunes, and you'll get a box that enables you to pick the library you want.
Tracks from CDs you copy go into whatever library's open. And now that you have those songs in this library, you can switch to the other one and get rid of them there. Three Types of Discs You can Create with iTunes
If you wish to record a certain playlist on the CD for posterity - or for the Mr. Shower CD player in the bathroom - iTunes gives you the power to burn, burn more, or back up. The program can create some of three kinds of discs if you select File?Library?Burn Playlist to Disc:
Standard audio CDs. This is actually the best option: If your computer has a CD burner, it may serve as your own private record label. iTunes can record selected sets of songs, no matter what the original sources, onto an empty CD. When it's throughout, you can play the burned CD on any standard CD player, similar to the ones from Best to buy - but this time, you hear just the songs you like, in the order you like, with all the annoying ones eliminated. You can also burn a particular playlist to a CD by clicking the Burn Disc button on the bottom-right corner from the iTunes window.
MP3 CDs. A typical audio CD contains high-quality, enormous song files in the AIFF format. An MP3 compact disk, however, is a data CD that contains music files in the MP3 format. Because MP3 songs are much smaller than AIFF files, many more of them fit in the standard 650 or 700 MB of space on a recordable CD. The bottom line? Rather than 74 or 80 minutes of music, a CD filled with MP3 files can store 10 to 12 hours of tunes. The downside? Older CD players may not be able to play these CDs.
Backup CDs or DVDs. If your computer can play and record both CDs and/or DVDs, you have another option: iTunes can back up your entire library, playlists and all, by copying it to some CD or DVD. To see if your disc drive works with iTunes, select a playlist and click the Burn Disc button on the iTunes window to get the Burn Settings box. If your drive name shows up next to "CD Burner," iTunes recognizes it.
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