| In the previous chapter, you saw how you can browse your iTunes music collection by genre, artist, and album. This makes finding music fast and easy, even if you have thousands of songs in your Library. This functionality is enabled because each song in your Library has information also called a tag that categorizes and identifies that song for you. Genre, artist, and album are just three of the possible tags for each song in iTunes. There are many more items of information that iTunes manages. These types of data fall into two groups: data that iTunes assigns for you and that you can't change, and data that you or iTunes assigns and that you can change. note  | Not all songs have all the data fields listed. You will only see data that is applicable to a specific song. For example, only music purchased from the iTunes Music Store has information about the purchase. |
Data that iTunes assigns and that you can view but can't change include the following: Kind This identifies the type of file the song is, such as Protected AAC audio file, AAC audio file, MP3, and so on. Size The amount of disk space required to store the song. Bit Rate The quality level at which the song was encoded. Larger numbers, such as 128Kbps, are better. Sample Rate The rate at which the music was sampled when it was captured. Date Modified The date on which the song file was last changed. Play Count The number of times the song has been played. Last Played The last time the song was played. Profile A categorization of the song's complexity. Format The format in which the song was encoded, such as MPEG-1, Layer 3. Channels Whether the track is stereo or mono. Encoded With The tools used to encode the song, such as iTunes, QuickTime, and so on. ID3 Tag ID3 tags are data formatted according to a set of specifications. If a song's data has been formatted with this specification, the ID3 version number will be shown. Purchase By, Account Name, and FairPlay Version If a song was purchased from the iTunes Music Store, this information identifies who purchased the music and which account was used. The FairPlay version information relates to the means by which the song is protected. Where This shows a path to the song's file on your computer along with the filename.
note | One "kind" you will see is Protected AAC audio file. This indicates that the song was purchased from the iTunes Music Store. You will learn about this type in Part III, "The iTunes Music Store." |
Data collected for songs that you can change includes the following: Name This is the name of the song. Artist The person who performs the song. Album The name of the album from which the song comes. Grouping This is a label you can assign to group songs together in some fashion. Composer The person who is credited with writing the song. Comments This is a free-form text field in which you can make comments about a song. Genre This associates a song with its musical genre, such as jazz or classical. Year The year the song was created. Track Number The song's position on the CD from which it came, such as "2 of 12." Disc Number The number of the CD or DVD. This is meaningful only for multiple-disc sets. BPM The song's beats per minute. Part of a Compilation This indicates whether the song is part of a compilation CD, meaning one that contains music from a variety of artists (you know, like that Greatest TV Theme Songs from the 1970s CD you love so much).
When you add a song to your Library, iTunes will add as much of this data as it can find for each song. However, you can add or change the data in the previous list. So, why should you care about all this data? There are a couple of reasons. note | When you insert a CD, iTunes attempts to get that CD's information from the CDDB (the online CD database), which is why it connects to the Internet. If iTunes finds the CD in this database, the information for that CD is applied to the CD and carried into the Library if you import the songs from that CD into iTunes. If you purchase music from the iTunes Music Store, it also contains many of these tags. |
The first is that, as you already know because you learned how to browse and search your Library in the previous chapter, this data can be used to find music in which you are interested. That reason alone should be enough to convince you that these types of data are important to you. The second reason is that when it comes time to create playlists (which you will learn about in Chapter 18, "Creating, Configuring, and Using Playlists"), you can use song tags to determine which songs are included in your playlists. For example, you can configure a playlist to include the last 25 songs you have played from the Jazz genre. This is just a basic example you can get much more sophisticated than this. In fact, you can include several combinations of these types of data as criteria in playlists to create interesting sets of music to listen to. |
