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iTunes Preferences Shortcuts

You may know that you can open Apple's iTunes preferences with Apple-, (and some of you remember the old Sound Jam shortcut Apple-Y), well in the latest version of iTunes you can now use apple-1, apple-2, and so on to access each tab of the preference pane.

by dfbills on Jul 07 | 12:57 pm

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How to Make a High-Quality Audio CD in iTunes

Learn how to set up iTunes to make a high-quality audio CD from Apple's tech info library:

Music on an audio CD is not compressed. Compressing music from an audio CD may reduce the sound quality depending on your the bit rate.2 The MP3 and AAC formats are forms of compression. Encoding music using the AIFF or Apple Lossless encoder will preserve the high-quality sound found on the CD. If you intend to use iTunes to make a custom audio CD from your audio CD collection, you should always use the Apple Lossless or AIFF encoder for best results.

Follow these steps to make a high-quality audio CD using iTunes:

1. From the Edit menu (Windows) or the iTunes menu (Mac OS X), choose Preferences.
2. Click the the Importing button.
3. Choose AIFF Encoder or Apple Lossless Encoder from the Import Using pop-up menu and click the OK button. Tip: Importing CDs with Apple Lossless Encoder uses less hard drive space with the same quality as AIFF.
4. Insert an audio CD.
5. Make sure the checkbox next to the names of the songs (tracks) that you want to include on your disc is checked and click Import. Repeat this step until you've imported all the songs you want to save on the disc.1
6. From the File menu, choose New Playlist.
7. Type a name for the playlist and press Return.
8. Click the Library icon in the Source list.
10. Drag the songs you want to include on the audio CD to the new playlist.
In the playlist, drag the songs so they are ordered according to how you want to hear them when they're played back. The approximate total time of the songs in the list is displayed at the bottom of the window. (It does not include the Preference setting for the amount of silence between songs.) Most discs can hold a maximum of 74 minutes of music.
11. Click Burn CD.
12. Insert a blank CD-R disc.
13. Click Burn CD again.

It takes several minutes to save, or "burn" the songs to the disc.

If you also want the songs to be available in iTunes for playback you may want to delete the AIFF versions from the Library to free up hard disk space and import them again using the MP3 Encoder. See technical document 165135 [url=http://www.info.apple.com/kbnum/n165135]"Removing songs from your library"[/url for information on how to delete song files.

Alternatively you can follow the steps in technical document 93123 "iTunes 4: How to convert a song to a different file format" to create MP3 files from the AIFF files.
Notes

AIFF encoding requires much more hard disk space than MP3 encoding because AIFF is not compressed. You should make sure you have enough free hard disk space before importing many songs. All the songs from a typical audio CD take up about 650 MB.
For more information on Bit Rate options, see technical document 93144, "iTunes 4: About AAC Custom Import Options" or document 93129, "iTunes 4: About MP3 Custom Import Options"

http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=60784
iTunes: How to Make a High-Quality Audio CD

by dfbills on Apr 15 | 11:07 pm

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Managing a huge library

I have a library of nearly 5,000 songs, so I have come up with a pretty good way of organizing everything.

I have an SPL called "Good Music". It has songs rated from *-*****, thats how I rate my music. Anything I like gets a rating based on how much I like it, and I set that SPL to Party Shuffle. Problem is, when theres only 600 songs in the playlist and you listen to iTunes and your iPod for hours a day, music begins to get repetitive.

I created a new SPL for songs whos play count is 0, and now have that set to play in Party Shuffle. This lets me do 2 things. 1 is to listen to music that I have pretty much completley ignored. The second thing it lets me do is add a rating to it. I have Synergy set up for keyboard shortcuts, so whatever I'm doing on my Mac, if I like a song, I just hit a few keys to rate it. It gets added to my Good Music SPL so when I listen to that list, its not as repetitive.

Then my last SPL is simple. It just takes songs from my Good Music SPL and limits it to 700MB randomly. I have an MP3 CD player in my car, so I can just burn songs I like to a CD, throw it in my car's CD player and play it in shuffle mode and have hours of music for driving. Its like my own commercial free radio station. When I get sick of that CD, I just have iTunes re-generate 700MB more worth of songs and burn that.

by yg17 on Mar 12 | 8:00 am

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Managing comments

If you are like me, you like to use the comments tag to make some smart playlists, based on a variety of things-- I use mine to make playlists for working out, for relaxing, for happy songs, and so on.

However, if you have a large library, it can be a bit of a pain to get all of your songs commented. So what to do?

If you're running iTunes on a Mac, you can get an AppleScript that lets you append text to the comments tag. That's simple enough. But what I also do is keep regular playlists based on each keyword. If I don't want to go through and do each track individually, I just drag a song into an appropriate regular playlist. Then, when there is a goodly number, I head into the playlist and select all the tracks and use the Applescript to append whatever comment to the entire playlist.

I am not sure how much time it saves, but it is a good way to remember what I have tagged and what I have not.

by synecdoche on Mar 09 | 8:00 am

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Comments

When I first started using comments to make play lists, I got a little out of control. I had something like 50 different words. With 10 gigs of songs, it was getting a little hard to keep up with. Not to mention my fingers hurt from having to type so much.

I decided to streamline it all using ASCII art. I'm a really visual person, and nothing takes more than three characters to type, which is nice. Here are a few examples:

<3 For songs about love
</3 For songs about betrayal/breakups
o-o Songs for working out
zzz Songs for my sleep playlist
=o Songs I like to sing along to

I'm not sure if this will work for anyone else, but it works perfectly for me.

by texan1510 on Feb 10 | 8:00 am

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	Chris Henley: Try this guy out. He has some great stuff. http://ott ... Jun 13 \| 1:56 pm Chris Henley: IS this site still running? ... Jun 09 \| 5:06 pm Elizabeth: Now, is there a program that will put these lyrics on your Ipod? That would be genius... :D ... Apr 18, 06 \| 6:11 pm Sara S: Ah, I see your point now, especially with the running example. About the only workaround there would be to make ... Apr 16 \| 10:29 pm vaughnn: Sara, Thank you again for your consideration! ... Apr 15 \| 10:45 pm vaughnn: Good question Sara! I (usually) don't listen to the iPod with it in my pocket and little ear buds plugged into ... Apr 15 \| 1:53 pm Sara S: I don't think you're really reading what I wrote. Maybe I'm not explaining myself well. I didn't adovcate creating a single ... Apr 13 \| 10:13 am

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