Chapter 5. Enjoying Your Music and Video in iTunes

IN THIS CHAPTER:

Find and Play Music in iTunes

Customize Smart Shuffle Options

Create a Playlist

Create a Smart Playlist

Rate Your Music in iTunes

Find and Play Videos in iTunes

Subscribe to and Listen to Podcasts

Listen to an Internet Radio Station

Use the iTunes Visualizer

Provide Customized Background Music with Party Shuffle

Auto-Level Song Volumes

Create Crossfades Between Songs

Protect Your Kids from Explicit Content

Now that your iTunes Library is packed full of the music you love, it's time to sit back and enjoy itand explore some of the ways that iTunes takes advantage of the inherent versatility of the digital music medium to let you do more things with your music than you'd ever thought possible.

Finding a favorite album and playing it from beginning to end, as you're accustomed to doing with your CD collection, is a matter of two or three clicks to navigate to the album's location and start playing it. However, that's where the limitations of CDs start to kick inand where iTunes starts to break free of them. Even with an expensive multidisc changer, organizing lists of songs from various physical discs is a laborious and nonintuitive process. But with iTunes, creating a playlist of favorite tunes in a themed mix or carefully engineered progression is as simple as clicking and dragging. Randomizing (or "shuffling") tracks, something you can do in CD players, is something you can do in iTunes, toobut with even more versatility, such as the ability to reorganize automatically shuffled tracks on the fly (in Party Shuffle) or to intuitively select similar songs in sequence.

One thing that no CD-player engineer ever dared to dream, however, is the ability to generate a dynamically updated list of songs selected from your entire Library on the basis of certain specified criteria, such as the genre, release date, or a personal "star" rating that you assign to each track. With Smart Playlists, iTunes gives you this ability, making it not just possible to sift through your music to find exactly the right tunes for the right occasion, but also making it automaticas though you had your own private DJ.

Because of the versatility of software, several more features are available in iTunes to enhance the satisfaction you get from playing your music. You can crossfade songs, having one start playing while the previous one is fading out, like they do on the radio. You can also have iTunes examine all your music with the Sound Check feature, ensuring that each album plays at the same relative volume level. And with the built-in Visualizer, iTunes turns your music enjoyment from a purely auditory pastime into a treat for the eyes, too.

With iTunes' video playback features, you can organize and watch your favorite music videos, TV shows, and home movies with as much ease as playing your digital music. You can even put your videos in playlists, just as you can with music tracks, and assign "star" ratings to your videos to indicate how much you like each one.

iTunes is an ideal application for subscribing and listening to podcasts; it automatically retrieves new episodes of your favorite podcasts as they become available, and you can organize them in iTunes just as you would regular music tracks, in their own special section. iTunes gives you several options for how you want your podcasts to behave, such as indicating how many episodes you want to keep on your computer and for how long. You can even use iTunes' built-in parental controls to ensure that podcasts with explicit contentand content from other unpredictable sourcesdoes not reach your child's iTunes copy.