iPad: The Missing Manual, 7th Edition

Chapter 7. Music

Of all the iPad’s talents, its iPoddishness may be the most successful. This function, after all, gets the most impressive battery life. There’s enough room on your iPad to store thousands of songs. And iTunes Radio means that you’ll never run out of music to listen to—and you’ll never have to pay a penny for it.

To enter iPod Land, open the Music app. On a new iPad, it’s at the lower-right corner of the screen.

Tip

There’s another way to get to iPod mode. Just swipe upward from the bottom of the screen. That opens the Control Center, whose central feature is the music playback controls and a volume control.

The Music program begins with lists—lots of lists. The icons at the bottom of the screen represent your starter lists: Radio, Playlists, Artists, Songs, Albums, Genres, Compilations, and Composers. Here’s what they all do.

iTunes Radio

Your iPad includes an amazing gift: your own radio station. Your own empire of radio stations, in fact.

The iTunes Radio service lets you listen to exactly the kind of music you want to hear. It doesn’t just distinguish among genres like jazz or rock—your choices are more like “upbeat male vocals with driving brass section” versus “slow lovesick ballads with lots of strings.”

You don’t get to choose the exact songs or singers you hear; you have to trust iTunes Radio to choose songs based on a song, singer, or music genre that you specify as a “seed.” For example, if you choose Billy Joel as your “seed,” ...