Switching to the Mac: The Missing Manual, Tiger Edition

232 switching to the mac: the missing manual

When it’s all over, you’ll find the imported songs listed in your Library (click the

Library icon in the left-side Source list). From there, you can drag them into any other

“folder” (playlist), as described next.

Playlists—and Smart Playlists

When you click the Library icon in the left-side Source list, the main part of the screen

displays every music file iTunes knows about. It’s organized much like a Finder win-

dow, with columns indicating the song length, singer or band, album, and so on. As

always, you can rearrange these columns by dragging their headings, sort your list by

one of these criteria by clicking its heading, reverse the sorting order by clicking the

heading a second time, and so on. To find a particular song, just type a few letters into

the Search blank above the list. iTunes hides all but the ones that match.

Apple recognizes that you may not want to listen to all your songs every time you

need some tunes. That’s why iTunes lets you create playlists—folders in the Source

list that contain only certain songs. You might create one called Party Tunes, another

called Blind Date Music, and so on.

Creating playlists

To create a new playlist, click the New Playlist button in the lower-left corner of the

window, or choose FileÆNew Playlist (c-N). A new playlist appears as an icon in

the list at the left side of the screen. You ...