Browsing and Viewing Your Tunes

Pouring all your CDs into iTunes isn't enough. Being able to find songs you're looking for is critical. Clicking any column in the iTunes Browser will sort that column alphabetically. Generally, an alphabetical arrangement by artist is pretty useful.

In the top of the window is a Search field; just start typing, and iTunes will do its best to find songs that you are describingwhether the letters you type are part of the name of a song, an artist, or an album. One particularly cool aspect of the search feature is that it starts looking as you type so you don't have to type an entire word, and you never need to press Return.

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By default, when you're searching for music, iTunes checks the Artist, Album, Composer, and Song Name fields. You can narrow your search by choosing just one of these fields. To do so, click the search icon (the magnifying glass) to the left of the Search field, choose the category you want to search, and then type your criteria in the Search field.

After Search, the most useful method of browsing a large collection is the built-in Browser. See that eye in the top corner of the window? Click it. The track info area will rearrange itself into some useful quadrants.

In this view, simply select one of the items in any of the three columns and you can quickly drill down any search through the collection. If you select All in any column, you get the full Library. Browsing by genre creates an experience that is akin to the way you might wander down aisles in a music store. If your tastes are more eclectic, you could skip genre and focus on artist.

1.	Click an artist's name and only songs by that artist show in the window below.
2.	Two albums from this artist are displayed together. Select one of the albums, on the right, and the search is narrowed even further:
3.	To get back to the full Library, select All Artists (or All Genres) and you'll see all the songs again.

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If you don't want to browse with the Genre column visiblesay you simply never use this very general criterionyou can make the column invisible in the Browser. Choose iTunes Menu > Preferences > General, unselect "Show genre when browsing," and then click OK.

Now that you've seen how to import and browse, you're ready for the key feature of iTunes: the capability to pull together songs from different albums and different artists based on whatever criteria you feel are important. It all comes down to playlists.