iPad: The Missing Manual, 4th Edition

Chapter 13. Master iTunes On the Desktop

You’ll learn to:

• Customize iTunes’ look

• Automatically create playlists

• Edit song and album info

• Add custom album art

• Create multiple iTunes libraries

AS YOU CAN TELL from the last chapter, iTunes is an important part of your iPad experience. Even if you use the airy offerings of iCloud to back up, match, or re-download your music, iTunes converts tracks from your own CDs to iPad-ready digital files. It also lets you organize your media library locally on your computer—no Internet connection necessary. And if you don’t use iCloud, iTunes brokers the transfer of songs, music, videos, books, personal info, and apps between your computer and your tablet.

If you’ve never had an iPod or iPhone before you got your iPad, you may not know what a powerful media jukebox iTunes is. As this chapter explains, you can customize its look, make playlists in all kinds of ways, change a song’s file format, adjust each song’s equalizer settings, and even keep your iTunes library on an external drive for safekeeping.

So when it comes time to charge your iPad for a few hours, take a spin through iTunes.

Change the Look of the iTunes Window

DON’T BE MISLED BY iTunes’ stylized brushed-aluminum look. You can push and pull its various window parts like salt-water taffy:

• If you set the column browser to appear above the iTunes window (How iTunes Organizes Your Content), you can ...