Don’t be misled by iTunes’ stylized brushed-aluminum look. You can push and pull its various window parts like salt-water taffy:

Lovely as iTunes is, it takes up a heck of a lot of screen real estate. So when you’re working on other things, you can shrink iTunes down to size. In fact, iTunes runs in three sizes: small, medium, and large:

Tired of losing your mini-iTunes window among the vast stack of open windows on your screen? Make the iTunes mini-player always visible on top of other open documents, windows, and assorted screen detritus. Open iTunes’ Preferences window (Ctrl+comma [⌘-comma]), click the Advanced tab, and then turn on the checkbox next to “Keep Mini Player on top of all other windows.” Now you won’t have to click frantically around the screen trying to find iTunes if you get caught listening to your bubblegum-pop playlist.

iPads can play back music in several digital audio formats: AAC, MP3, WAV, AIFF, and one called Apple Lossless. If you find your songs’ audio quality lacking, you can change the way iTunes encodes, or converts, them when it copies tracks from your CDs. iTunes gives you two main options in its import settings box. Go to Edit (iTunes)→Preferences→General, and then click the Import Settings button to get there. Your options are:

To see a song’s format and other technical information, click its title in iTunes, press Ctrl+I (⌘-I), and then click the Summary tab in the Get Info box.

Instead of just presenting you with boring lists, iTunes gives you four options for browsing your media collection—some of them more visual than others. Click the View button at the top of iTunes to switch among them.

You can call up a list of all the songs with a specific word in their title, album name, or artist name just by clicking the Source pane’s Music icon ( , under “Library”) and typing a few letters into the Search box in iTunes’ upper-right corner. With each letter you type, iTunes shortens the list of songs it displays, showing you only tracks that match what you type.

For example, typing train brings up a list of everything in your music collection that has the word “train” somewhere in the song’s information—maybe the song’s title (“Boat Train”) or the Steve Earle album (Train A Comin’). Click the other Library icons, like Movies or Audiobooks, to comb those collections for titles that match a search term.

You can also search for specific titles using the iTunes browser mentioned earlier in this chapter. If you can’t see the browser pane, press Ctrl+B (⌘-B) to summon it. The browser reveals your music collection grouped by categories like genre, artist, and album (select the categories at View→Column Browser). Hit the same keys again (Ctrl+B [⌘-B]) to close the browser.

Sometimes you’ve got a song in iTunes whose format you want to change—you might need to convert a big AIFF file before loading it onto your iPad, for example. First, head over to Edit→Preferences (iTunes→Preferences), click the General tab, and then click the Import Settings button. From the Import Using pop-up menu, pick the format you want to convert to and then click OK.

Now, in your iTunes library, select the song you want to convert and choose Advanced→Create MP3 Version (or AIFF, or whatever format you just picked).

If you have a whole folder or disk full of potential converts, hold down the Shift (Option) key as you choose Advanced→“Convert to AAC” (or your chosen encoding format). A window pops up so you can navigate to the folder or disk holding the files you want to convert. iTunes won’t convert protected media: Audible.com tracks and older tracks from the iTunes Store that still have copy-protection built in. If you bought a song after April 2009, though, odds are you’re delightfully free of such restrictions, since that’s when Apple stopped copy-protecting music.

iTunes deposits your freshly converted tracks in your library, alongside the songs in their original format.

If you want to improve the way your songs sound, use iTunes’ graphic equalizer (EQ) to adjust the audio for the type of music you play. You might want to boost the bass tones in dance tracks to emphasize the booming rhythm, for example.

To get the equalizer front and center on your screen, choose View→Equalizer (Window→Equalizer) and unleash some of your new EQ powers.

Tired of seeing so many tunes named Untitled in your library? You can change song titles in iTunes—to enter a song’s real name, for example, or to fix a typo—a couple of ways.

In the song list, click the text you want to change, wait a moment, and then click again. The title now appears highlighted and you can edit the text—just as you do when you change the name of a Word document on a desktop computer.

Another way to change a song’s title, artist name, or other information is to click the song in the iTunes window and press Ctrl+I (⌘-I) to summon the Get Info box. (Choose File→Get Info if you forget the keyboard shortcut.) Click the Info tab and type in the new track information.

Too much work? You can always try Advanced→Get CD Track Names and see what comes up, although the Gracenote database iTunes uses may not know the title if it’s something deeply obscure or homemade.

You don’t have to adjust your track information on a song-by-song basis. You can edit an entire album’s worth of tracks by clicking the Album name in the iTunes column browser (or on its cover in Grid View) and pressing Ctrl+I (⌘-I) to bring up the Get Info box.

Ever careful, iTunes flashes an alert box asking if you really want to change the info for a bunch of things all at once. Click Yes.

You can make all sorts of changes to an album in the four-tabbed box that pops up. Here are a few examples:

To create a playlist, press Ctrl+N (⌘-N). You can also choose File→New Playlist or click the + button at the bottom left of the iTunes window.

All freshly minted playlists start out with the impersonal name “untitled playlist.” Fortunately, iTunes highlights this generic name, ready for editing—just type in a better name: Cardio Workout, Hits of the Highland Lute, or whatever you want. As you add new lists, iTunes alphabetizes them in the Playlists area of the Source list.

Once you create and name a spanking-new playlist, you’re ready to add your songs or videos. You can do that in three ways, so choose the one you like best.

If you change your mind about a playlist’s tune order, drag the song titles up or down within the playlist window. Just make sure to sort the playlist by song order first (click the top of the first column, the one with the numbers listed in front of the song titles).

You can always drag more songs into a playlist, and you can delete titles if you your playlist needs pruning. Click the song in the playlist window and then hit Delete or Backspace. When iTunes asks you to confirm your decision, click Yes. Remember, deleting a song from a playlist doesn’t delete it from your music library—it just removes the title from that particular playlist. (You can get rid of a song for good only by pressing Delete or Backspace from within the iTunes library; select under “Library” to get there.)

You can quickly add a song to an existing playlist right from the main iTunes window, no matter which view you happen to be using: Select the song, right-click (Control-click) it, and then, in the pop-up menu, choose “Add to Playlist.” Scroll to the playlist you want to use and then click the mouse button to add the track.

To see how many playlists contain a certain song, select the track, right-click (Control-click) it, and then choose “Show in Playlist” in the pop-up menu.

When it’s time to get rid of a playlist once and for all because the party’s over, select the playlist icon in iTunes and press the Delete key. You see a message box from iTunes asking you to confirm your decision. If you autosync your iPad, the playlist disappears from there, too.

Playlists are fun to make, but occasionally you just don’t have the time or energy. If that’s the case, call in an expert—the iTunes Genius. With the Genius feature, you click any song you’re in the mood for and iTunes crafts a playlist of 25 to 100 songs that it thinks go well with the one you picked.

The first time you use it, Genius asks permission to go through your music collection and gather song information, and then it uploads that data anonymously to Apple. Apple’s software analyzes your information and then adds it to a big giant database of everybody else’s song info (to improve the Genius’s suggestions). After that, the Genius is ready for duty. Here’s the procedure:

The Genius doesn’t work if it doesn’t have enough information about a song—or if there aren’t enough similar songs that match your kick-off song. In that case, pick another tune. If you frequently add new music to your library and want to get it in the mixes, inform the Genius at Store→Update Genius.

And if you have the Genius sidebar open as you listen to music, the Genius cheerfully presents you with a list of complementary songs that you can buy right there to round out your listening experience.

Yes, the iTunes Genius feature takes almost all the effort out of making a play-list—all you do is click the Genius button. But if even a one-button click seems like too much effort, iTunes makes hands-off playlist creation even easier. Welcome to Genius Mixes.

The Genius Mix feature works like this: iTunes takes it upon itself to search your entire music library and then automatically compose (depending on the size of your library), up to 12 different song collections. Unlike a Genius playlist of tunes calculated to go well together, a Genius Mix is more like a radio station or cable-TV music channel based on genre. Depending on what’s in your iTunes library, the Genius could present you with a hip hop mix, a country mix, a classical mix, and so on. In addition, the Genius Mix creates up to 12 playlists at once, all saved and ready to play, unlike the Genius’s single mix that you have to save to preserve.

If you don’t already see a square purple Genius Mix icon () in your iTunes Source list, choose Store→Update Genius. Once activated, the Genius quietly stirs up its sonic concoctions from your music library.

To play a Genius Mix, click the Genius Mix icon in the Source list. The iTunes window reverts to Grid View and displays the mixes it created, each represented by a quartet of album covers from tracks in the mix. Pass your mouse pointer over the album squares to see the name of the mix or click the squares to start playing music.

Like most traditional radio stations, you don’t get to see a list of what’s actually in a particular Genius Mix—it’s all a surprise. If you don’t care for a song the Genius included, hit the forward button or tap the right-arrow key on your computer keyboard to skip to the next track.

Genius Mixes can be another great way to effortlessly toss on some background music at a party, and you may even hear songs you haven’t played in forever. Want to take the Genius Mix with you? Sync it to your iPad (Sync Music).

Although there’s no way to give a song two thumbs up in iTunes, you can assign an album or each song in your collection a one- to five-star rating. Then you can use the ratings to produce nothing but playlists of the greatest hits on your hard drive.

If you assign an album a single rating, all the songs on that album get the same number of stars. If you rate just a few tracks on an album but not all of them, the album rating reflects the average of the rated songs—so an album with two five-star songs and a bunch of unrated tracks gets a five-star rating.

You can even rate songs on your iPad, and iTunes records the ratings the next time you sync up.

To rate a song on your iPad, start playing it and tap the small album cover in the Now Playing corner to switch to the full-screen Now Playing window. Tap the screen to get the hidden playback controls to appear, then tap the icon on the bottom right corner. The album cover spins around to reveal the track listing. Swipe your finger along the row of dots above the song list to transform those empty dots into critical stars for the track that’s currently playing.

As cool as the Genius is, sometimes you want a little more manual control over what goes into your automatically generated music mixes. That’s where Smart Playlists rise to the occasion.

Once you give it some guidelines, a Smart Playlist goes sniffing through your music library and comes up with custom mixes based on those guidelines. A Smart Playlist even keeps tabs on the music that comes and goes from your library and adjusts itself based on that.

You might tell one Smart Playlist to assemble 45 minutes’ worth of songs that you’ve rated higher than four stars but rarely listen to, and another to play your most-often-played songs from the 1980s. The Smart Playlists you create are limited only by your imagination.

A Smart Playlist is a dialogue between you and iTunes: You tell it what you want in as much detail as you want, and the program whips up a playlist according to your instructions.

You can even instruct a Smart Playlist to pull tracks from your current Genius playlist. Just click the + button to add a preference, choose Playlist as another criteria, and select Genius from the list of available playlists.

Facebook, MySpace, Twitter, Tumblr, Flickr—if there’s anything the top social-networking sites have proved, it’s that people like to share stuff with their friends. And now there’s Ping, Apple’s very own social network designed to connect people who have a mutual love of music.

In case you had any doubt about what Ping is supposed to be, Steve Jobs himself described it as “Facebook and Twitter meet iTunes.” (While Ping was originally supposed to link with Facebook through the Facebook Connect service so you could easily update your profile with your Ping activities, a case of “unfriending” between Apple and Facebook prevented the partnership. So far, anyway.)

As with any social network, the first thing you have to do is set up your profile page, your own little part of Ping where you can list your favorite bands and artists, keep track of upcoming events, exchange notes with other music-minded pals, and hear samples of what your friends are listening to.

To set up your Ping profile:

When you get Ping set up, it works just like any other social network. You can post your thoughts on the current state of music—and read those of your Ping friends. You can sign up to follow bands and musicians who use Ping—to see what Lady Gaga, Yo-Yo Ma, and others are up to, for example. You can write your own album reviews, comment on friends’ pages, browse music news, and check concert listings for your favorite groups. You can click the Like button next to albums or tracks to publicly post your approval.

Items you buy in the iTunes Store get listed on your Ping page, too, so everyone knows what you’re into these days. If you’d rather keep your ’80s synthpop addiction a secret, hide your purchases by clicking the Remove button next to the item on your Recent Activity feed.

If you use the handy Ping sidebar to see what your pals are listening to, you’re not chained to the desktop for updates. On the iPad, tap Home→iTunes→Ping (right) to keep up with Ping things while you’re out with your tablet.

Ping isn’t for you? If you want to turn it off, click the Account link on the main Store page and log into your iTunes account. On the Account Settings page, click the buttons to either edit your profile (which you can also do from a link on your Ping page itself) or turn off Ping for good.

There’s Home Sharing and then there’s home, sharing. Many families have just one computer. If everyone’s using the same copy of iTunes, you soon get the Wiggles bumping up against the Wu-Tang Clan if you have iTunes shuffling the music tracks, or when you autosync multiple iPads. Wouldn’t it be great if everyone had a personal iTunes library to have and to hold, to sync and to shuffle—separately? Absolutely.

To use multiple iTunes libraries, follow these steps:

To switch between libraries, hold down the Shift (Option) key when you start iTunes, and you’ll get a box that lets you pick the library you want. (If you don’t choose a library, iTunes opens the last one used.) Tracks from CDs you copy go into whatever library’s open. And now that you have those songs in the new library, you can switch back to the other one and get rid of them.

Ever notice songs in a playlist or in your iTunes library that you don’t remember buying? Good thing that iTunes keeps track of what you buy and when you buy it. If you suspect that one of the kids knows your password and is sneaking in forbidden downloads or maybe that your credit card was wrongly charged, you can contact the Store or check your account’s purchase history to see what’s been downloaded in your name.

To do the latter, in the iTunes window, click the triangle next to your account name and choose Account from the menu. Type in your password and then click Purchase History. Your latest purchase appears at the top of the page, and you can scroll farther down to see a list of previous acquisitions. Everything billed to your account over the months and years is there, including gift-certificate purchases. If you see something wrong, click the “Report a Problem” link and say something.

If you have other issues with your account or want to submit a specific query or comment, the online help center awaits. From the iTunes Store’s main page, click the Support link. Your web browser presents you with the main iTunes service and support page; click the link that best describes what you want to learn or complain about. For billing or credit card issues, check out the iTunes Account and Billing Support link on that same web page.

Media libraries grow large, and hard drives can seem to shrink, as you add thousands of songs and hundreds of videos to iTunes. You may, in fact, think about using a big external drive for iTunes storage (and more iPad videos). That’s just dandy, but you need to make sure that iTunes knows what you intend to do.

If you rudely drag your iTunes Music (or Media) folder to a different place without telling iTunes, it thinks the songs and videos in your collection are gone. The next time you start the program, you’ll find a newly created, empty Music folder. (While iTunes remains empty but calm, you may be having heart palpitations as you picture your media collection vanishing in a puff of bytes.)

To move the Music folder to a new drive, let iTunes know where you’re putting it. Before you start, make sure iTunes has been putting all your songs and videos in the iTunes Music folder by opening the Preferences box (Ctrl+comma [⌘-comma]) and confirming the folder location. Then:

Ignore the ominous warnings (“This cannot be undone”) and let iTunes heave a complete copy of your iTunes folder to the external drive. Once you confirm that everything is in the new library, trash your old iTunes Media folder and empty the Trash or Recycle Bin to get all those gigs of space back.

If your hard drive dies and takes your whole iTunes folder with it, you lose your music and movies—and your iPad will be lonely. Apple’s new iCloud service lets you re-download songs, apps, and iBooks you’ve purchased, but you may have library items that are unavailable in the iTunes Store (or that you homeripped) that are gone forever. Luckily, iTunes gives you a super simple way to back up your files onto a CD or DVD.

If you ever need to use your backup copies, open iTunes and put in one of those discs to start restoring your files. Remember, there’s nothing really exciting about file backups—until you have to use them to save the day.