iPod and iTunes: The Missing Manual, Third Edition

Printing Playlists and CD Covers

In earlier versions of iTunes, you had to do a lot of gymnastics just to make a nice-looking song list to tuck into the CD jewel case of a freshly burned disc: export the playlist as a text file, import it into a word-processing program, style the type, and six hours later…Print. With iTunes 4.5 or later, you just choose File → Print, select a preformatted option, and click the Print button.

As you can see from Figure 5-23, the Print dialog box is full of choices.

Figure 5-23. The Print dialog box in iTunes 4.5 and later gently guides you though making a CD jewel-case insert (top), just printing out a basic list of songs (middle), or creating a catalog listing of all the albums on a mix (bottom). In Mac OS X, you can also fax a copy of your document to someone (click the Print button to get to the Mac’s built-in fax option).

• You can print out a perfectly sized insert for a CD jewel case, complete with song list on one side and a miniature mosaic of all your album artwork on the other—or just a plain list of songs on a solid color background. (If you choose to make a CD insert, your resulting printout even comes with handy crop marks you can use to guide your X-Acto blade when trimming it down to size.)

• If you want something simpler, you can opt for a straightforward list of all the songs on the playlist.

• You can also print out a list of all the albums ...