33. Find and Play Music  BEFORE YOU BEGIN 9 Import a Music CD into iTunes 20 Purchase Audio from the iTunes Music Store
 SEE ALSO 34 Create a Playlist 46 Find and Play Music on the iPod 60 AirTunes: Connect iTunes to a Stereo with AirPort Express
As a "jukebox" application, iTunes' primary function is to play music. Its controls for playing, pausing, and skipping forward and backward through your music are as straightforward as on any comparable piece of software or hardware. Where iTunes differs from just about any other piece of software, to say nothing of a physical rack of CDs, is in navigating through your library to find the music you want by name and to play it through your computer's speakers . Using the navigation lists in the Library view, you can select a single album, an artist (and all that artist's albums at once), or a whole genre (and all the artists and albums within it). The songs matching the selections you've made are listed according to the display columns you've highlighted, in a manner that's intended to make the most sense for the way you typically use the program. After you've chosen the music you want, just click Play and enjoy.  TIP An example of iTunes' intelligent sorting is that if you sort the songs in the listing by Album or Year , the tracks are secondarily sorted within each album in the order of their track number, making it a simple affair to listen to all of an artist's work from earliest release to latest in the artist's intended presentation.
| 1. | Select the Library Source
Click Library in the Source pane of the iTunes' window. All your songs are shown in the listing area in the main body of the iTunes' window.
| | 2. | Choose a Genre, Artist, or Album If the Genre, Artist , and Album lists at the top of the window are not shown, click the Browse button to display them. These lists work like filters, allowing you to make a selection from any list to limit the songs iTunes shows you to only the ones matching that selection. TIP The Genre list is optional; you can hide or show it in the General pane of the iTunes Preferences window (choose Edit, Preferences in Windows or iTunes, Preferences on the Mac) by toggling the Show genre when browsing check box. Suppose that you want to listen to some Paul Simon music. In the Artist list, scroll down until you see Paul Simon's name listed. Click his name. Notice that the Album list updates to show you only Paul Simon's albums, and all the tracks in all his albums are displayed in the listing below, hiding all the rest of your music. You can filter the listing further by selecting a single album from the Album list. 33. Find and Play Music  NOTE In the Artist list (and only in that list), artists whose names begin with The are sorted according to their name without the The ; so to find music by The Romantics, look in the R part of the list. To cancel your selections and return the song listing to showing the entire contents of your Library, scroll up to the first entry in a list where you selected an entry (it says All , followed by the number of entries in that list). Alternatively, click the header of the list to remove its filter and select the All option. | | 3. | Play Music Sequentially Click the Play button, and iTunes begins playing the first song in the list. Adjust the volume to your liking using the slider underneath the Play button (this slider doesn't affect the system volume, only iTunes' relative volume level). NOTE When iTunes is playing, the Play button changes to a Pause button; click it to stop the music but retain your place, so that if you click Play again, iTunes resumes where it left off. However, if you select a different option in the Source pane (such as a playlist ), the Play button changes to a Stop button, indicating that if you stop playback and then click Play again, iTunes will play using the currently selected source and not the original selection of music. As iTunes plays each song, it moves automatically to the next one in the list as displayed. Skip to the next song or back to the previous one using the Forward and Back buttons; click and hold these buttons to fast-forward or rewind within a song. When iTunes finishes playing a song, it updates the Last Played date/time field for that song and increments its Play Count field. Keep this in mindit'll be important for when you create Smart Playlists ! If you want to start playing in the middle of the song listing, click a song to select it and then click Play to begin playback with that song. Alternatively, double-click the song to play it. | | 4. | Shuffle Your Music Of course, you can play your music in its originally intended order as it appeared on the CDbut sometimes you're just not in the mood to listen to the tracks in someone else's recommended order. The Shuffle button, in conjunction with judicious use of the Browse lists, gives you plenty of new options for how to hear your music. With an Artist or Album selectedor even if you're viewing the unfiltered Library with no selectionsclick the Shuffle button underneath the Source pane in the lower-left corner of the window; it lights up blue when Shuffle mode is activated. In this mode, iTunes skips randomly from song to song in the selection. The displayed list of songs is not rearranged accordingly (the songs are still shown according to which display column you've selected); you won't know which song iTunes will skip to next. TIP iTunes automatically scrolls the display to show the currently playing song, indicated with a blue "speaker" icon next to its title. However, if you're scrolled far away from the playing song and want to jump to it without scrolling manually up and down in search of it, choose File, Show Current Song to skip directly to it. If you're viewing a playlist (see 34 Create a Playlist ), the Shuffle option actually rearranges the displayed songs based on the order in which they'll play. This reordering happens because playlists have a built-in play order, shown in the first column, which is the default column selected to sort the playlist. | | 5. | Repeat Playback of the Current Selection  The Repeat button lets you choose what iTunes should do when it comes to the end of the selection of music. If the button is not selected, iTunes stops playing when it finishes the last song in the list. Click it to turn on Repeat mode; in this mode, the selected list of songs starts playing again from the beginning after it finishes. Click the button again to enter Repeat Once mode, indicated with a small 1 on the button's iconthis means iTunes keeps repeating the currently playing song over and over. Click Repeat once more to turn Repeat mode off. | | 6. | Minimize iTunes to a Floating Window
You can get the iTunes' window out of the way while it's playing tunes by clicking the green Zoom button (on the Mac) or by choosing Advanced, Switch to Mini Player (on Windows); this command shrinks iTunes to a small floating controller known as the Mini Player . You can move this player anywhere on the screen that's convenient , play and pause the music, skip from track to track, adjust the volume, and see what song is currently playing.
| TIP If you want, you can have the Mini Player float above everything else on your screen so that it's never hidden; select the Keep Mini Player on top of all other windows check box in the Advanced pane of the iTunes Preferences window (choose Edit, Preferences in Windows or iTunes, Preferences on the Mac to display the Preferences window).
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