Yesterday we gave our son an iPod Mini for his birthday. Since he and I will no doubt be swapping files, I figured life would be simpler if I gave up my long time use of MusicMatch Jukebox and started using iTunes.
I have a couple questions that I couldn’t find in the Help file.
Advance apologies if these are stupid questions. In the back of my mind I get the feeling I’ll being doing one of these :smack: when I see the answers!
In MusicMatch, if I double-click on a song it starts playing. If I then click on another song, it adds it to the playlist. In iTunes, when I click on the second song, the first song stops, and the second song starts playing. Is it possible in iTunes to create an “on-the-fly” playlist? I want to be able to listen to the songs that just popped into my head and be done with it, without saving a playlist.
Also – in the Library, can I have one line for each artist that I can expand if I want to see the songs? And can I rearrange the columns so that Artist is first, then Album, and Song?
While you can’t do exactly this, you can turn on the Browse window in the library, which gives you a Genre column, an Artist column, and an Album column in a split pane above the rest of your library. You do this by hitting the Browse button (the eye) in the upper right hand corner of the iTunes window. These then work like search filters. If you select a certain artist, only that artist’s songs show up in the library pane. You can further narrow the search by selecting a genre or a particular album.
You can rearrange the order of the columns by clicking on the title of the column and dragging it left or right. I can’t seem to put any column other than song first, though.
One workaround is to use the Party Shuffle feature. Set it to display 0 upcoming songs, then you can right-click on a song and have it added to the Party Shufle.
You don’t even have to set it to 0 songs, Yookeroo. When you right-click on any song, one of the options it to play next in Party Shuffle. That way you can play whatever you want immediately and also let the shuffle pick stuff randomly if you haven’t selected anything.
For futher fun, you can add comments to your songs, and then create Smart Playlists that key off those comments. I’ve got a few in this matter – one for all songs in Chinese, one for all songs my wife likes, etc.
True. But if you want to build a playlist on the fly in the order you want to hear it, you need to set it to 0. If you don’t care about the the order of your playlist (and don’t mind random songs shuffled in), then you’re right (and that is the way I use it :)).
When I first saw the Party Shuffle feature, I kind of rolled my eye thinking it wasn’t a big deal. But as I use it, I find myself liking it a lot. I wish it had smart playlist “conditions” though.
I must have hit a key combination or dragged something or something happened in my main library where instead of a long list of songs, there are now two sets of windows. A set of Genre-Artist-Album windows and then a song list below comprised of whatever is currently highlighted. Actually, I’m not complaining about this, as it does make things easier to navigate. However, I hate it when something happens and I don’t know why. Anyone know what the heck I did?
One iTunes trick a lot of folks don’t know is that you can also bring up the browser split-pane in playlists, just by using the “Show browser” menu command. So you can have a smart playlist with whatever criteria you need, and still use the browser to navigate it quickly.
