If you listen to digital music, you will no doubt come across Apple's ubiquitous iTunes jukebox software at some stage. This tutorial covers its fundamentals, focusing on practical instruction for some basic and intermediate aspects of iTunes' standard playlist feature (saving Genius and Smart playlists for another time).
Watch the video, then click through the photo gallery below to get a better look at all the screenshots.
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Three kinds of playlists
As of iTunes 8, playlists come in three flavours: standard; Smart; and Genius. Smart and Genius playlists really deserve their own tutorial, so for now, let's just tackle the standard variety.(Credit: CNET)
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Making a new playlist
Creating a standard playlist is pretty straightforward. You just hit the plus button in the bottom left corner of iTunes or go to the file menu and select New Playlist. iTunes will create an "untitled playlist" that you can name whatever you want.(Credit: CNET)
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Adding music
To add music to the playlist, just go to your music library, select the album or individual songs you want to add and drag them onto the list.(Credit: CNET)
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The right-click method
Another method for adding music to your playlist is to right-click on a song and add it by selecting your playlist from the "Add Song to Playlist" menu.(Credit: CNET)
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Sorting your playlists
To put the songs on your playlist in a certain order, you can sort by any of the column headers. If the default columns don't do it for you, there's many more column fields under View Options. To tweak the playback order on a song-by-song basis, sort by the first column, which lists songs numerically and drag songs up and down the list until you're satisfied.(Credit: CNET)
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Working with check boxes
Another playlist trick you can use are these check boxes next to each song. By unchecking a song, iTunes will skip over the track, but keep the song in the playlist. This comes in handy if you have something like a dinner music playlist you use regularly, but maybe tonight's guests can't stand hearing Enya, so you just temporarily uncheck your Enya tracks from the mix.(Credit: CNET)
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Playlist folders
Now, if you start going crazy with playlists and make dozens of them, you can also play around with making playlist folders. This is like a playlist for your playlists, and helps keep things organised. To make a playlist folder, go to the file menu and select "New Playlist folder". Name it whatever you like and then start dragging playlists into the folder. You can collapse and reveal folder contents using the arrow to the left of the folder.(Credit: CNET)
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