iPOD & ITUNES for Dummies Portable Edition

Chapter 5

Adding and Editing Information in iTunes

In This Chapter

• Retrieving information online
• Editing information for each content item
• Adding information, comments, and ratings

Organization depends on information. You expect your computer to do a lot more for you than just store a song with Track 01 as the only identifier. Not only can iTunes retrieve the song's track information from the Internet, but it can also find the cover art for you.

Adding all the information for your iTunes content seems like a lot of trouble, but you can get most of the information automatically from the Internet — and without all that pesky typing. Adding track information is important because you certainly don't want to mistakenly play Frank Zappa's “My Guitar Wants to Kill Your Mama” when trying to impress your classical music teacher with the third movement of Tchaikovsky's Pathétique Symphony, do you? And because videos you make yourself or convert from other sources don't have this automatic information, you have to enter some description to tell them apart.

This chapter shows you how to add information to your content library in iTunes and edit it for better viewing so that you can organize your content by artist, album name, genre, composer, and ratings. You can then use this information to sort your content in List view or Browse view by clicking the column headings. This chapter also describes how to add cover art for navigating your library with Cover Flow.

Retrieving Song Information ...