iPad: The Missing Manual, 5th Edition

Chapter 13. Master iTunes On the Desktop

You’ll learn to:

• Customize iTunes’ look

• Automatically create playlists

• Edit song and album info

• Add custom album art

• Create multiple iTunes libraries

AS YOU CAN TELL from the last chapter, iTunes is an important part of your iPad experience. Even if you use the airy offerings of iCloud to back up, re-download, or match your music, iTunes converts tracks from your own CDs to iPad-ready digital files. It also lets you organize your media library locally on your computer—no iCloud connection necessary. And if you don’t use iCloud, iTunes brokers the transfer of songs, music, videos, books, personal info, and apps between your computer and your tablet.

If you’ve never had an iPod or iPhone before you got your iPad, you may not know what a powerful media jukebox iTunes is. In addition to managing your media, iTunes lets you easily organize it into playlists (customized song lists) that you can copy over to your iPad. Don’t feel like mixing your own music? Let iTunes do it for you automatically with its Genius and Smart Playlists features.

This chapter also explains how you can customize iTunes’ look, change a song’s file format, adjust each song’s equalizer settings, and keep your iTunes libraries on an external drive for safekeeping. So when it comes time to charge your iPad for a few hours, take a spin through iTunes.

Change the Look of the iTunes 11 Window ...