We've shown you how to tweak Apple's Mail application. Now it's time to explore similar tweaks and tips for making iTunes more to your taste.
Of course, iTunes is in a different league from Mail. You could almost argue that it is Apple's single most important piece of software after OS X, its flagship digital product.
Why? Because iTunes is the software hub that makes the iPod such a successful device.
And since it was made available for Windows as well as Mac OS X, iTunes has become the first piece of Apple software many people ever see. As such, it acts as a representative, a means for Apple to show off its wares to potential new customers. The presence of iTunes on so many Windows machines may well be a significant contributor to the apparent iPod "halo effect" that has helped Apple's bottom line in the last year and prompted encouraging predictions from industry analysts about the years to come.
What's more, iTunes does so many things. From its beginnings as a humble audio player, iTunes has now become a central point for downloading and enjoying all manner of multimedia content. Podcasts, music videos, online radio, TV shows, and audio books have all got a place in the iTunes Sources bar.
And iTunes is also a store. For many people, the iTunes Music Store is the first thing they try out when using iTunes for the first time. What better way to celebrate the arrival of a new Mac than to fire up iTunes and go shopping? For some newbies, buying a song on iTMS might be their first-ever experience of online retail. No wonder people get hooked.
So iTunes has a unique position. It is much, much more than a music player. It is Apple's representative to the non-Mac world, a focal point for Apple's growing media empire, and a pioneering combination of desktop application and online service.
With all that in mind, let's ask ourselves: how can we mess around with iTunes?
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If you're someone who likes to sleep in the same room as your Mac (oh yes, we know you're out there), then it makes sense to use it as a sophisticated alarm clock. Better yet, fix it so that iTunes wakes you up with your favorite songs each morning. AlarmThingy should do the trick.
If it can wake you, of course iTunes can lull you to sleep as well.
Two little apps, iTunesshut and Counter, can help you here. Just pick a playlist to fall asleep to, and nod off knowing your machine will switch itself to sleep when you're safely snoring.
In OS X 10.4, iTunes comes with a decent stack of Automator actions (including several designed for use with iPods) you might like to play around with.
It's easy, using Automator, to create a workflow that looks out for important mail messages, or those filtered in any way you choose, combines them into a new text file, and syncs it to your iPod every time you plug it in.
When you have the Get Info panel open, you can quickly zip through the info for other songs in the current playlist or view by hitting Command+N for Next and Command+P for Previous.
To stop your iPod automatically updating itself when you plug it into the computer, hold down Command+Option while you do so. You can let go when the iPod appears in the Source list.
To toggle the equalizer window (what do you mean, you didn't know iTunes had an equalizer window?), hit Command+2. And to control precisely what columns are displayed in each playlist, hit Command+J and fiddle with the view options.
At the bottom of the iTunes window, you see a summary of the size of your iTunes library, showing the length of time, in days, that it would take to listen to all your songs. Command-click this to change the display to a precise total showing days, hours, minutes and seconds.
To scrub backward and forward through a song while it is playing, use Command+Option+left/right arrows.
Many people won't even try to print anything from iTunes--after all, it's not used to create any kind of document. But if you do select an album or playlist and hit Command+P, you'll find a clever dialog box that lets you print various kinds of CD sleeves, including album artwork and neatly formatted track listings. In full color, if you want.
If you enjoy the visual stimulation of the iTunes Visualizer, you might also get a kick out of taking control of it. While the Visualizer is active, you can use a handful of key commands to change how it behaves:
You can use these in tandem, flicking from one color/effect/shape combo to another, until you find the visual effect you like. It's fun. There are some more Visualizer commands:
While we're on the subject of obscure keyboard commands, here's another. When looking at the iTunes preferences panel, you can flip from one tab to another by using Command+1 for the General tab, Command+2 for the iPod tab, and so on.
With Library selected in the Source column, hit Command+J to bring up the View Options box; tick the box next to Equalizer. A new column appears in the library view, with a drop-down menu next to every song, so you can adjust the sound to suit your taste, and to suit the music.
One of my favorite add-ons for iTunes is Clutter, a free, open source app that lets you look at your music collection the old-fashioned way: by seeing the sleeves.
Clutter gives you the chance to put music CDs anywhere you like on your Desktop. You can drag them into whatever patterns or piles you like. To play an album, double-click the sleeve. It's nice.
And if you're someone for whom the thought of manually importing thousands of artwork images is too much to take, don't worry. There are a bunch of apps and scripts around that can do much of the work for you. Fetch Art is free software for OS X that uses the ID3 tags in your music database to identify songs; it downloads the appropriate artwork from Amazon. Doug's Applescripts has a good selection of additional artwork management tools once you get the hang of things.
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One of the most impressive visual replacements for the iTunes library has to be CoverFlow, a (currently) free app that makes browsing an album collection lots of fun.
On first launch, CoverFlow automatically sets out to find as much cover art as it can for you. It starts off looking on your hard disk, in case you already have artwork stored in iTunes. But failing that, it'll hunt around online to find artwork, and import it without a fuss.
CoverFlow displays your albums as a neat stack. You scroll through them with clicks, or by dragging the A-Z slider at the bottom. Double-click the frontmost album cover and it starts playing (at this point, CoverFlow creates a new playlist in iTunes with the appropriate tracks and starts it playing).
It might sound like a gimmick but CoverFlow is an enchanting little app, if only because it encourages you to forage within your music collection, the way people used to when music came on 12-inch vinyl.
While CoverFlow does a great job of finding artwork for itself, you can't use it to populate your iTunes library with artwork.
In the event that CoverFlow doesn't appeal to you, have a look at the $20 alternative, CoverBuddy. It won't fetch artwork from the net (the developers were warned off this by their lawyers), but on the other hand it runs on OS X 10.3 Panther, while CoverFlow is 10.4 Tiger-only.
New in iTunes 6.0.2 is the ability to share videos.
You probably know that libraries and playlists within iTunes can be shared over a network. Anyone else on the network can listen to the music directly from your Mac. With hardware extras like Airport Express, you can use AirTunes to distribute shared music to audio-video devices too. It's all very simple to set up.
But what if you want to do more with your shared music? What if you have a desktop and a laptop, and want to make a perfectly legal copy of some music from one to the other? Either Blue Coconut or getTunes can help you here. They allow you to download a copy of a song from a sharing source to your local hard disk.
Sharing music across your own network is nice, but wouldn't it be great if you could share your music with others, across the internet?
You can, using either Zerospan or SlimServer, both free applications. Zerospan works in conjunction with Address Book, allowing anyone listed there to connect directly to your Mac via a specially generated data tunnel, through which Bonjour-compatible services can be used as if on a local network. As well as sharing music, Zerospan claims to make all manner of other things possible, including Apple file sharing. As with most networking issues, beware of hiccups; Zerospan's makers are keen to stress that your mileage may vary.
SlimServer, on the other hand, is cross-platform Perl that creates a music broadcasting server on your chosen computer (Windows, Mac, or Linux). Although created and released by the company behind Squeezebox, the code supports streaming of a wide range of file formats across pretty much any network, between all kinds of computers and devices. It plays nicely with iTunes, and boasts a simplified browser-based user interface for track-to-track control. There are even some plugins for further hackery if you're feeling inspired.
AccessTunes is another option. It's shareware ($15), and allows music sharing from the moment the computer has started up (in other words, before any users have logged in).
A recent newcomer to iTunes, podcasting has really taken off in the last year. By making the distribution of podcasts so easy, iTunes has made a big contribution to spreading the podcast meme further and wider than ever before.
But in iTunes, you have limited control over what happens to the podcast files you download. In the preferences, you can say how many recent episodes you want to keep, but this setting applies to every podcast you subscribe to.
CastAway is a shareware ($7) helper which lets you decide how long to keep episodes of each individual podcast. Now you can choose to keep the audio that's worth keeping, and trash the stuff that doesn't deserve the disk space. There's a bunch of other useful features in it too.
A podcast is ultimately a specialized RSS feed, one with audio or video files as enclosures. That makes iTunes, like the new iPhoto 6, an RSS reader of sorts. Which means that if you find a podcast you like on the Web somewhere, it's easy to add it to iTunes using Advanced -> Subscribe to Podcast.
Ultimately, iTunes is a database, albeit a very easy one to use. But like any database, it needs a little bit of care. The data you put in is used by many of the add-ons we've mentioned in this article.
Let's return to Doug's Applescripts. He's got one called Proper English Title Capitalization which will do a great job of tidying up all your track metadata, making it easier to read and possibly easier to use alongside other metadata-dependent services.
If you enjoy classical music and get frustrated by iTunes' clear bias towards more typical "artist/title" data for pop music, you'd do well to read a tip, and more importantly the resulting discussion, at MacOSXHints.com.
Giles Turnbull is a freelance writer and editor. He has been writing on and about the Internet since 1997. He has a web site at http://gilest.org.
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