# Itunes tips and tricks?

Category: Geeks r Us

## Post 1 by Polka dots and Moonbeams (I've now got the bronze prolific poster award! now going for the silver award!) on Wednesday, 18-Nov-2009 17:30:02

Hey, I'm thrilled to announce, I have a gorgeous Christmas Green Nano 5gen!
I'm rapidly learning Itunes9.
Could you offer up any tricks to creating playlists? I have some folders on my laptop, that you'd say is a playlist, but I can't figure out an easy to translate that into an itunes playlist. Sure I can add the folder, but then Itunes organizes it into all the proper places. I'd have to sort through all the sngs to recreate the playlist.
Any ideas?
Thanks!

## Post 2 by Polka dots and Moonbeams (I've now got the bronze prolific poster award! now going for the silver award!) on Thursday, 19-Nov-2009 15:57:52

Ok, I am loving the folder automically add to itunes. That makes things so much easier! Especially since I added a shortcut to it in sendto.
Now, if there was a folder for playlists. *smile*

## Post 3 by Polka dots and Moonbeams (I've now got the bronze prolific poster award! now going for the silver award!) on Friday, 20-Nov-2009 16:16:46

Wooh-Hooh! I figured out the playlist thing!
*Grin,* there is a small chance I look like a dork responding to my own thread, but who knows, someone may come across this and find some helpful tips.
Control-N creates a new playlist, hit your context menu on the new playlist and O-open for open in new window. Once you've done this tab to the list box and you can copy and paste your files. Worked like a charm for me! Yippy!
Next step, I need to find a way to tidy up my library. Seems, I already have duplicates going on.
Got to love trial and figure out! *lol*

## Post 4 by The Straight Edge Superstar (Please, allow me to once again explain why you are wrong.) on Friday, 20-Nov-2009 18:46:29

Clean up your library by bringing up the Context menu over your selected files and edit the name, genre, etc. for the selected files.

## Post 5 by Jesse (Hmm!) on Friday, 20-Nov-2009 21:59:19

Wow! I need to try the playlist thing. I wonder if I can do it on the Mac?

## Post 6 by purple penguin (Don't you hate it when someone answers their own questions? I do.) on Sunday, 22-Nov-2009 13:14:48

F6 switches between views. It saves tabbing around. It was a recent discovery of mine.

## Post 7 by The royal princess (Zone BBS Addict) on Sunday, 22-Nov-2009 15:20:18

I also have itunes and I have to use it to use audible which sucks. I have a go gear and I wish I can convert AA files to mp3 but oh well. They say I have to burn it with Itunes because of some kind of apple rights or something. I guess I have to take the long way around to convert it. Is there an easier way to get to the burn button? Gosh I dont like it so far.

## Post 8 by Polka dots and Moonbeams (I've now got the bronze prolific poster award! now going for the silver award!) on Saturday, 05-Dec-2009 19:50:37

Does anyone know the difference between add to playlist and show in playlist?

## Post 9 by Jesse (Hmm!) on Saturday, 05-Dec-2009 21:21:03

I think show in playlist refers to where it is in the playing order.

## Post 10 by Polka dots and Moonbeams (I've now got the bronze prolific poster award! now going for the silver award!) on Sunday, 06-Dec-2009 2:05:07

Ok, so I should choose add to playlist, when I am in my main itunes library?
Also, a song should be listed in my library and in my playlist? It doesn't move to my playlist and disappear from the main library, correct?
I'm still getting confused by some of this stuff.
And duplicates, they are confusing me. Lol, I'm not sure how to stop that from happening so far. *lol*

## Post 11 by blindndangerous (the blind and dangerous one) on Sunday, 06-Dec-2009 11:05:31

Ok your two questions in order.
yes they will be in your library, and in your playlist. Think of it this way.
Your library is just that a library. When you take things and put them into a playlist, you are making a copy of the link to the song that is in your library and putting it into its own separate place.
Your second question, the reason you have dupplicates is because you have two entries in your library that are pointing to the same thing. Go to the edit menu? and click on show dupplicates, then delete all the dupplicates you find.

## Post 12 by purple penguin (Don't you hate it when someone answers their own questions? I do.) on Sunday, 06-Dec-2009 11:15:51

My iTunes likes to place songs and albums in the wrong order, and sometimes the IPod shows them in a different order than ITunes. All their tags are correct. I make sure of it, and it takes a long time to sort through all of them.

## Post 13 by The Elemental Dragon (queen of dragons) on Sunday, 06-Dec-2009 16:38:36

what i've found out, never synk your ipod with ituns on shuffel, because that will put your playlist into a random order...

## Post 14 by Polka dots and Moonbeams (I've now got the bronze prolific poster award! now going for the silver award!) on Thursday, 17-Dec-2009 12:13:43

Sheesh, I'm still inside my own Itunes U, self taught. *lol*
Has anyone played around with the smart playlist feature? I'm quite enjoying it!
Holiday09. My rules are any song with holiday or christmas as the genre should add to this playlist.
Haydn Hall. This one is easy, any trak with Haydn as the composer belong in this playlist.
I continue to have fun learning iTunes. Lol, and I'm still making some mistakes. I'll tell ya, it definitely isn't as easy as anipod, but there are some cool features.
It'll be interesting after the holidays to remove the hundreds of Christmas songs I have. Fingers crossed I don't mess anything up!

## Post 15 by Leafs Fan (I'll have the last word, thank you!) on Thursday, 17-Dec-2009 13:25:29

I haven't downloaded Christmas songs because I figure I'd slaughter my library trying to get rid of them. Thanks for all the hints about playlists. I'll be eager to see what else you learn!

## Post 16 by Jesse (Hmm!) on Thursday, 17-Dec-2009 15:18:38

The trick is to make sure that Holiday is in the genre field of all your Christmas songs, and then when you want to remove them, just turn the browser on with Control-B, browse to the holiday genre, and press the delete key.

## Post 17 by The Elemental Dragon (queen of dragons) on Saturday, 19-Dec-2009 21:47:39

I've been thinking of updating to itunes 9, but i'm using jaws 10, how well would it work, and if i updated, would i have to a readd everything to my library again, add everything to itunes again, and have to readd everything to my ipod again ?

## Post 18 by data (Cheese flows through my veins!) on Sunday, 20-Dec-2009 10:56:24

iTunes nine doesn't work very well with Jaws 10, so you'll want to upgrade your screen reader before you upgrade to iTunes 9. As far as the iTunes upgrade, no, it will automatically import everything from iTunes 8, so you won't need to do much of anything on that front.
Hope this helps.

## Post 19 by bermuda-triangulese (Help me, I'm stuck to my chair!) on Sunday, 20-Dec-2009 17:00:52

how well does itunes support flack?

## Post 20 by purple penguin (Don't you hate it when someone answers their own questions? I do.) on Tuesday, 22-Dec-2009 1:24:55

I always wondered why people use these lesser known audio formats. Is it the quality? I can't ever tell the difference, but then, that's just me.
Anyways...
When I added my music folder to ITunes, I found that it showed one less song than what is actually in my folder. Now I can either go through and find the missing song, or add each individual song. Then I can find out what was not being added. Both methods can take lightyears withnearly 1100 songs. This happened to me once, but it was with one album. I forgot how I fixed it so that the entire thing got added.

## Post 21 by blindndangerous (the blind and dangerous one) on Tuesday, 22-Dec-2009 9:43:59

I can answer both questions.
For your audio question, their is a difference, though sometimes I have trouble hearing it too. For 128 KBPS MP3 audio, sometimes you can hear artifacting, which makes the audio sound like its underwater. You really can't hear this at higher qualities. Flack is extremely high quality, but the songs are about 30 megs a piece.
For your second question, go to file, then go to add golder to library. This will add the folder to your library, but won't add dupplicates. Instead I think it refreshes the paths to the songs in its database, and if it finds that missing song, it adds a link to it.

## Post 22 by WillieTheWoof (I'll have the last word, thank you!) on Monday, 04-Jan-2010 11:55:46

ITunes 9 works quite well with Jaws 11. The store is accessible however the account creation still needs work.

## Post 23 by ItsAConspiraZ (This site is so "educational") on Monday, 04-Jan-2010 12:04:42

I'm not a fan of iTunes at all, partticularly the way in which it interacts with my iPod Touch. For whatever reason you can only sync certain artists, genres, playlists or individual tracks (I'd prefer albums). I'm also running into a lot of entries in my library with an "invalid location." Random songs are missing from certain artists even though I added them to iTunes and they're all placed correctly in the directory structure. The way I get around it is by readding the artist's folder to the library and manually going through the songs table and deleting all of the invalid locations. Very frustrating. Isn't there some sort of "audit" feature which would automatically figure out what is and isn't in my library? When I delete folders from the music directory iTunes doesn't know they've been removed and thus they aren't deleted from the iPod when synced. What a frustrating program.

## Post 24 by BigDogDaddy (Help me, I'm stuck to my chair!) on Monday, 04-Jan-2010 12:17:10

As far as the account creation, you can create an apple ID via the apple web site, and later use it in the Itunes software!