ITUNES IS YOUR IPOD’S best friend. You can do just about everything with your digital files here—convert songs on a CD into iPod-ready tunes, buy music, listen to Internet radio stations, watch videos, and more. Here’s a quick tour of the main iTunes window and what all the buttons and sliders do.

The small drop-down menu on the left side of iTunes displays all your media libraries. Click an item in the panel to see its contents in the center of the main window, like so:

With iTunes 11, Apple radically overhauled the look of its all-purpose jukebox for the first time in nearly 10 years. For many people, it was a makeover long overdue. For newcomers to iTunes, well, they had to learn the program anyway. But for some long-time iTunes fans, the facelift was a jarring change that instantly lead to the question, “Hey, where’s all my stuff?

If you’re in that last group and long for the days of the Source panel that vertically listed all your libraries, connected devices, playlists, the iTunes Store, and everything else iTunes handled, fear not—Apple hasn’t abandoned you. With just a few quick trips to the View menu, you can get back to familiar territory:

If you give iTunes 11 a retro look like the one described here, you can push and pull columns and panes by clicking their edges and dragging them with your mouse. You can also right-click (Control-click) any column header to add a category you can sort, or click and drag the columns into a new order.

LOVELY AS ITUNES IS, it takes up a heck of a lot of screen real estate. When you’re working on other things, you can shrink it down.

Tired of losing your iTunes mini-player among an array of windows on your screen? Make it always visible, so that it sits on top of other open windows, documents, and assorted screen detritus. Open iTunes Preferences (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 at work.

IN Chapter 1, YOU learned how iTunes simplifies converting (also called ripping) songs from your compact discs into small, iPod-ready digital files: Pop a CD into your computer’s disc drive and iTunes walks you through the process. If you’re connected to the Internet, iTunes downloads song titles and other album info. A few minutes later, you’ve got copies of those songs in iTunes.

If you need time to think about which songs you want from a CD, no problem. Summon the Preferences box (Ctrl+comma [⌘-comma]), click the General tab, and then change the menu next to “When you insert a CD” to “Show CD.”

So now, if you don’t want to rip an entire album—you may not want anything from Don McLean’s American Pie besides the title track, for example—you can exclude songs you don’t want by removing the checkmarks next to their names. Once you pick your songs, click the Import CD button in the bottom-right corner of the screen.

You can Ctrl+click (⌘-click) any box to deselect all the checkboxes at once. To turn them all on again, Ctrl+click (⌘-click) a box next to an unchecked song. This is a great technique when you want only one or two songs from a CD; turn off all the checkboxes, and then turn on only the tracks you want.

As the import process starts, iTunes moves down the list of checked songs, converting each one to a file and, in Windows 7/8, dropping it in your Music→iTunes→iTunes Media→Music folder. On Mac OS X systems, songs go in the Home→Music→iTunes→iTunes Media→Music folder. (If you’ve had iTunes for years, your iTunes Media folder is probably still called iTunes Music, and there’s a separate Music folder inside it.)

An icon next to a song name means that iTunes is currently converting the track. Feel free to switch to other programs, answer email, surf the Web, or do any other work as iTunes rips away. If you skipped the chance to download song titles when you inserted the disc, click the Options icon on the right side of window to get them manually. Click the CD Info button to see the disc’s name and title. If you decide to abandon your mission, click the Stop Importing icon.

Once iTunes finishes ripping, each imported song bears a green checkmark, and the program signals its success with a melodious little flourish. Now you have some brand-new songs in your iTunes music library.

IF YOU’RE HAPPY WITH the way your music sounds on your iPod or through a pair of external speakers, feel free to safely ignore this page. But If you find the audio quality lacking, you can change the way iTunes encodes, or converts, songs when it imports them from a CD.

iPods can play several digital audio formats: AAC, MP3, WAV, AIFF, and one called Apple Lossless. In iTunes’ Import Settings box (Edit [iTunes]→ Preferences→General, and then click Import Settings), you get two main options. They are:

To see a song’s format and other technical info, click its title in iTunes, press Ctrl+I (⌘-I), and then click the Summary tab in the Get Info box. (See your name and Apple ID listed on iTunes Store tracks? Apple does keep a record of these things.)

INSTEAD OF JUST PRESENTING you with boring lists, iTunes gives you multiple ways to browse your media collection, some more visual than others. Just click the appropriate button at the top of the iTunes window. In all the views, an unadorned cloud or a icon next to a title means you bought the item on another device and can download it here from iCloud (Set Up an iCloud Account).

IN PREVIOUS VERSIONS OF iTunes, the Album view was a fairly straightforward affair—you got to see your music collection displayed as rows of colorful jacket art. (Unless, of course, you ripped the tracks from your own CDs and didn’t manually add your own artwork—you then see a gray music note, but the next chapter tells you how to fix that.)

iTunes 11 takes the traditional Album view and makes it much more useful. To see for yourself, click the Albums button at the top of the iTunes window. Now, click an album cover.

As shown here, the middle of the iTunes window opens up to reveal all the tracks on that album. You also see the ratings you gave them (Chapter 11) and the running time for each song. If you want more from a particular artist, click “In the Store” on the right side of the screen, and Apple shows you everything else by that singer or band. And it will gladly sell you their wares.

The open Album view also gives you a play button (), a shuffle button (), and the menu icon. Click the latter to get menu options for adding the album to your Up Next list, creating a Genius playlist, or adding the album to a playlist (you’ll find all these options explained in Chapter 12).

AS YOUR ITUNES MEDIA library grows, you may have trouble remembering just what songs, movies, and so on you have, or what album a song came from. In times like these, take to the trusty search box in the right-hand corner of the iTunes window.

As with search boxes on Web browsers, operating systems, and every place else they tend to appear, you just have to start typing in a keyword (the artist’s name, a song title, and so on). With each letter you type, iTunes shortens the list it displays, showing you only titles that match what you type.

For example, typing train brings up a list of everything in your collection that has the word “train” somewhere in the song’s information—maybe in the song’s title (“Mystery Train”), the band name (Wire Train), or the album name (Train A Comin’). The search function in iTunes 11 doesn’t limit itself to just one type of media, either. As shown below, you get results from across your media empire. Click a result in the list to jump to that item.

Another way to search for specific items is to use Songs/List view and the Column Browser mentioned earlier in this chapter. (If you can’t see the column browser, press Ctrl+B [⌘-B].)

Depending on how you configured the browser in View→Column Browser, it reveals your music collection grouped by genre, artist, album, composer, or grouping—all in a nice vertical list. Hit the same keys again (Ctrl+B [⌘-B]) to close the browser.

WITH ITS ABILITY TO randomly pluck and play songs, iTunes’ Shuffle feature has a huge number of fans, especially those who don’t want to think about what to listen to as they noodle around the Internet. To start shuffling, click at the top of the iTunes window; the icon turns blue when the player is set to shuffle. As you may remember from a couple of pages ago, you see this same icon in Album view when you have an album selected.

You’re not stuck with a single shuffling method, either. Some days you may feel like mixing up your music song by song, and other days you may be in the mood to change things up by album.

To control just what iTunes shuffles, choose Controls→Shuffle and select Songs, Albums, or Groupings from the submenu. (“Grouping” is a way to keep certain tracks together in your iTunes library, like separate movements in a piece of classical music that are part of a larger work.)

VISUALIZER IS THE ITUNES term for an on-screen laser-light show that pulses, beats, and dances in perfect sync to your music. The effect is hypnotic and wild, especially when summoned midway through a sluggish day at the office.

You need to pick a set of animations first. Choose View→Visualizer to select from the iTunes Visualizer (lots of Disco in Space moments) or the iTunes Classic Visualizer (trippy psychedelic patterns-a-go-go, as shown below).

True, you won’t get a lot of work done, but when it comes to stress relief, visuals are a lot cheaper than a hot tub.