Getting More from iTunes

Love it or hate it, iTunes is now firmly established as a staple app for digital consumers on both Mac and PC.

Personally, I love it. I love the way it’s driven by album graphics rather than lists, I love the way music is navigated and arranged and I love the fact that it takes the management of the underlying files and folders off my hands. Such things are dangerous for people like me - I spend enough time micromanaging my media as it is!

If iTunes is guilty of anything, it’s trying to do too much at once, and who can stay angry at it for that? It’s like telling your car to stop cooling your face. If there are features you don’t want to use, don’t use them. iTunes is here to stay, so let’s look at how we can get all we can from its cover-flowing goodness…

Use What You Have

There’s a bunch of bread-and-butter stuff in iTunes I see almost no one ever using, and parts of this guide will walk you through some of these features and why they’re so important for a good iTunes experience. Adding extra functionality to iTunes is difficult as it’s a pretty locked down environment that doesn’t lend itself to development of third party plugins, so most extra ‘features’ are only available via scripts, which are easy to add and use and will be covered briefly here.

Rate Your Songs and Albums

This is the first step to getting the most out of iTunes. Surprised? And yes, I do mean all of them. This is something we may avoid because we don’t want to take the time or don’t see the value, but I assure you the time is worth it. I got sick for a few days last year and spent most of that time in bed messing with my iTunes library and rating my whole collection (at the time, about 4,000 songs). But it wasn’t just because I’m a bit mental. It was because I could see the possibilities that this offered, particularly for Smart Playlists.

Smart Playlists are those little purple playlists in the left hand sidebar of iTunes (‘Recently Added’, ‘Recently Played’ etc). You may never use the default smart playlists created by Apple, but the great news is that you can create your own and they’re actually very flexible and powerful and open up new possibilities for smarter syncing to space-limited devices like iPhone, iPod Touch, Nano and Shuffle.

The size limits of these devices force us to be very selective with what we sync. So much so that we can waste a huge amount of time swapping files on and off and wishing we had more room to move. The same is true for iPad (unless you’re lucky enough to nab a 64GB model or have a small library). Let's look at how Ratings and Smart Playlists can help you keep all the songs you’re likely to want to hear in your pocket all the time.

Be A Five Star Snob

Does Barack Obama look like he’d listen to anything but the best on his iPod? Then why should you?! Rating your songs makes it easy to build playlists that include only your highest rated songs, meaning you always have killer tunes in your ears. You may already have a dedicated playlist for your favourite songs which you simply drag new tunes into (when you remember), but this can be a painfully inflexible and manual process and gives you none of the manipulation offered by the ratings system.

Smart playlists update automatically as your collection grows, so any list you’ve created using Rating as a criteria will automatically update as you rate new songs you’ve added to your library. This can take the pain away from the constant management of files on your devices. Read on for more examples.

Smart Playlists

Here are some examples of intelligent playlists you could create for your player using the ratings system:

• Five star songs added in the last 12 months (‘Best Current’)


• Five star songs in a particular genre (‘Best of Jazz’)


• Five star albums ('Best Albums', even if individual songs are rated at less than five stars)


• Five star songs from a particular decade (‘Best of 90s’)


• Any combination of the above and more

I have an 8GB iPhone 3G and a 45GB music library. About 3.5GB is already taken up by apps, photos and other data. Clearly, this forces me to be brutal with my song selection.

I use a combination of Smart Playlists and Autofill to keep me happy. I started by creating the two smart playlists below (Smart Playlists are easily created from the File > New Smart Playlist menu):

These two playlists allow me to always have five star songs and recently added tracks/albums (regardless of rating) in my pocket. But there’s a problem. I have about 8.5GB of five star songs in my library, meaning I have to cull even further. This is where Autofill comes in handy.

Autofill lets you specify a playlist and a threshold (for memory usage on your portable device) and fill the device with songs from that list. To use Autofill, plug in your iPhone via USB and click its Music icon in the sidebar. See the option at bottom:

When you select a playlist or smart playlist from this drop-down, iTunes will automatically randomly fill your device with songs from its contents, depending on your selections in the Settings… button.

This selection will fill your iPhone to whatever threshold you set. If you ever get bored of the songs iTunes has selected, just come back to this screen, delete all the songs in the list and autofill again. Too easy!

Song Notifications and Quick Ratings

The ongoing rating of new songs in your library is easy when you have the right tools. GrowlTunes is a Growl-based add-on (which requires Growl to work) which displays the currently playing track in a Growl notification when a new track starts. It shows cover art, title, rating, genre and composer information, but most useful for the purposes discussed here is its allowance of on-the-fly song rating from the menu bar:

This rates the currently playing song based on your selection, making it easier to stay on top of song ratings in your library as you add new music. I use this at work to manage my ratings without constantly dropping in and out of iTunes. Growltunes is a little short on other features and the metadata fields displayed in the notification window can’t be modified, but it gets the job done. To install it, download the latest Growl package and add it from the Extras folder.

Turn It Off

In the spirit of this article’s intro, don’t forget to turn off parts of iTunes you don’t plan to use. There’s no need to waste your sidebar pixels and headspace on shortcuts to features you don’t like or need. The same applies to any preset smart playlists and anything else in your sidebar you never use, or even the headers in grid view (which can be hidden via the menu item View > Grid View > Hide Header).

Common offenders like Ringtones, TV Shows and Movies can all be easily hidden from your sidebar from the Preferences menu under General if desired.

Adding Scripts

Scripts can be easily added to iTunes, which give you access to deeper file and metadata management and can be run on batches of files rather than one at a time.

DougScripts is probably the only site you’ll ever need to visit for iTunes scripts. To install a script, simply download it from DougScripts (or any other trusted site) and add it to the User > Library > iTunes > Scripts folder (create this folder if it doesn’t already exist) and restart iTunes. Now you’ll see the applescript icon in the menu bar. Click it to see your installed scripts:

Now, with any number of songs selected, run one of these directly from the menu bar to perform the relevant task. A good example of this is Append to Comments, which simply adds whatever text you enter into the box provided into the comments field of the song. I use this to quickly tag multiple songs with keywords for filtering via smart playlists. For example, I have very little music in my library in the way of female artists, but my wife likes to hear what I do have. Some of these are hidden on collaboration albums and I needed an easy way to include them all in a single smart playlist that automatically updates as I add new music.

For this, I simply select songs with a female artist and run Append to Comments, then enter the word Female. I have a smart playlist set up which shows all songs with the word ‘Female’ in their comments. This can naturally be filtered further by year, rating, genre etc.

Use The Same Library From Multiple User Accounts

This is not a syncing solution, but a simple way of accessing exactly the same library from exactly the same hard drive location from multiple user accounts on the same Mac.

By default, the iTunes library is installed in your User > Music folder, making it unavailable to other users who log into Mac OS on the same Mac.

If you want multiple accounts to have access to the same library, simply close iTunes and move the whole iTunes folder from your Music folder onto an external drive or into the root folder of Macintosh HD, then next time you open iTunes, hold down the Option key and choose the new library location.

Now log in as another user and perform the same steps on launch. You’ll be looking at exactly the same library, so all music, podcasts and metadata will be identical.

Stop Scrolling

A quick tip for Grid View fans. There’s no need to scroll endlessly through your grid to reach that artist that starts with 'Y'. Simply click in any space between album covers (the white or gray background) and start typing the first letter/s of the artist to jump straight to it. This new way of moving around will save you yonks!

Syncing iTunes Between Multiple Macs

Syncing large libraries between Macs is something iTunes doesn’t do very well... or more like, at all. I’m not talking about being able to see other local Macs’ libraries (which works fine apart from lumping you with a flat list rather than a proper grid/cover flow view), I’m talking about libraries actually syncing properly, updating each other when changes are made, not only with songs and albums but with metadata like play count, ratings and comments.

Home Sharing is an appreciated new feature of iTunes 9, but the only syncing added here is the automatic cross-copying of albums and other media purchased from the iTunes Store between Macs on the same network with Home Sharing turned on. I don’t know about you, but most of my media doesn’t come from the iTunes store, so this isn’t particularly useful.

Syncing large libraries is a big issue for many Mac users and is worthy of a dedicated article, which will be coming as a new guide in the coming weeks and will also explore syncing of iPhoto libraries. Stay tuned for this!