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Resizing iTunes windows

Written by Philip Roy
To quickly resize a window in iTunes 4 on an older Mac which struggles with the graphics power required for solid resizing, hold down the Apple key while changing the window's size as this reverts back to the Mac OS 9 styled outline resizing which is much quicker on older Macs, as well as newer ones.

Last Updated Sunday, 09 March 2008

Finding playlists for a song

Written by Philip Roy
To quickly find out how many playlists a song in your iTunes music library appears in, simply control click on the song you want to know about and go down to Playlists.
Last Updated Sunday, 09 March 2008

iTunes extended playlist

Written by Philip Roy

Because iTunes supports endless playlists, it makes a great jukebox for a barbecue or party. If you're compiling a playlist for such an occasion, and don't know if the music you've put in your custom playlist will last long enough, drag your favourite internet radio station from the Radio Tuner onto the end of the playlist you've just created.

That way, when your MP3s run out, the radio station will take over, meaning the music will last all night.

Last Updated Sunday, 09 March 2008

How do I import album art into iTunes 7?

Written by Philip Roy

Here are four ways that you can add artwork, with explanations as to the advantages and disadvantages of each. Note that I've ignored programs such as Clutter, which are a variation of the artwork collection and display approach. They are listed from the most recommended approach to the least.

Approach 1 - iTunes itself
iTunes 7 and above feature an option to import album artwork. This can be done on the basis of importing an entire library of songs artwork or on an individual song-by-song basis. The good thing is that if you have a number of songs from the same album in iTunes, it should figure this out and apply the same artwork to each song.

The advantage is that it can work through songs quite quickly and there is an easier way to change or remove artwork (right or control-click on a song and choose the option from a pop-up menu) making it easier to fix up mistakes. The disadvantage is if you have somehow manually added songs and their title and album cover names into iTunes, it may not find the right match.

Approach 2 - Widget search
The superb freeware dashboard widget Amazon Album Art Widget is specifically designed to try and track down album covers for you, usually offering many cover alternatives. If you see the right one, just click the widget to have it add the art to the current song playing in iTunes.

Approach 3 - Corripio
Corripio is a freeware/donationware program for fetching artwork and lyrics for songs from a number of sources. It is currently at version 0.7.2 which means the author still considers it under development and not worthy of being listed as Version 1. This is generally seen as acknowledgement that the software needs improving and you'll find that Corripio is a little buggy and there are some areas of the software that need improvement.

Using Corripio is very easy once you get the hang of it. Open up the application and it will load a list of your songs. You then select a song that you want to find the album artwork for (you can see an example in the image above) and then indicate how you want the program to search for a good match. In the example above, I've told it to search by album name for a Coldplay song.

Corripio has now searched for artwork and has shown me the various options that I have (in the example in the above, it's found the prefect match) so you just click on the image and click on the "Select" button. It will then assign that image to the song in iTunes.

But wait, if you've got a whole album in there, list them in order in Corripio, click the first song and then shift-click the last (in other words, select all the songs in that album) perform the search again and it will assign the artwork to all the songs.

 

Approach 4 - Search, drag and drop
The final suggestion is the most time consuming, but can solve the issue if the methods earlier can't find artwork for you. Go and find it yourself using your favourite search engine (such as Google)!

Then once you've saved the artwork image from a website to your Mac, start iTunes up, get the song playing (this is just the easiest way to indicate what song you are choosing in iTunes), from the "View" menu in iTunes make sure that "Show artwork" is selected and then drag the image file into the small window where the artwork is displayed.

In the example on the above, I've actually selected multiple songs that I want the same album image applied to.

Convinced you're not going to be able to find all that album art? Well one neat way to try and find as many matches as you can, is to upload your music list to this site (art4itunes.com) and get it to try and find the artwork for you. I was moderately pleased with the results.

Last Updated Monday, 10 March 2008

Is there a way to re-download just one episode of a podcast in iTunes?

Written by Philip Roy

Sometimes a podcast episode comes through faulty. It can be for many reasons and often you'll find the person producing the podcast realises there is an issue with a file and uploads a new version into their podcast feed. That's OK for those yet to download that podcast episode...but for you, does it mean you have to trash the entire podcast series and start all over again? Answer: No :-)

Simply delete the most recent episode that is causing the issue. In the example that we are going to show you here, we're going to re-download "Webnation Episode 7".

Next, click on the name of the podcast series in iTunes and at the bottom of the iTunes window, click on "Unsubscribe"

 

Now that you've unsubscribed from the podcast, just click the "Subscribe" button to subscribe again as shown.

 

Last Updated Tuesday, 11 March 2008