iPod & iTunes: The Missing Manual, Second Edition

Searching and Shopping

You don’t have to log in to browse the store—only when you want to buy music or audiobooks.

And music is everywhere you turn in the iTunes Music Store. Click any album cover or text link to zoom right to it. The upper left corner area of the Music Store home page offers a pop-up menu to jump straight to the Genres you want to explore.

You can also use the Power Search tool, shown at top in Figure 6-4, to zero in on a specific song, artist, album, genre, or composer—or just peruse the text-based lists, as shown in Figure 6-4 at bottom.

Figure 6-4. Top: Click the Power Search link on the Music Store’s home page to do some serious sleuthing for specific songs. Bottom: One click leads to another when browsing the iTunes Music Store. Click Browse, then pick a Genre and then click an Artist on the next list to see the albums available by that musician or group. Once you have settled on a genre, the store unfurls a list of all the artists in that category.

When you find a performer you’re interested in, click the name to see a list of songs or albums on hand for purchase. If you click an album name, all of the songs available from it appear below in the Details window. Double-click a track to hear a 30-second snippet of it to see how it suits you, or to make sure that’s really the song you were thinking of, before buying it.

You navigate the iTunes Music Store aisles just ...