iLife '04: The Missing Manual

Music Store Billing

The iTunes Music store keeps track of what you buy and when you buy it. If you think your credit card was wrongly charged for something, or if you suspect that one of the kids knows your password and is sneaking in some forbidden downloads before you get home from work, you can contact the store or check your account’s purchase history page to see what’s been downloaded in your name.

GEM IN THE ROUGHBack Up Only What Needs Backing Up

They say that backing up is hard to do—but mainly, it’s hard to remember what you’ve already backed up and what still needs attention.

Here, however, is a sneaky trick that makes iTunes help you make backups of all the songs you’ve bought or ripped since the last time you backed up your iTunes Music folder. This means you won’t have to burn the whole darn library to a stack of CDs or DVDs each time, and can just fill a disc with the new stuff you’ve added.

After you’ve backed up your music files to disc for the first or latest time, open iTunes and choose File → New Smart Playlist.

In the Smart Playlist set-up box, change the pop-up menus to say Date Added—is after—[today’s date]. Make sure Live Updating is turned on, and that there’s no limit set for the amount of songs on the playlist. When you click OK, give your new playlist a name, like Smart Backup.

The next time you’re ready to burn a data backup disc, back up only your Smart Backup playlist to get the only latest library additions.

Then, once you’ve burned it to CD, choose File ...