You have ripped or imported all of your CDs into your iTunes music library. You also buy music from the iTunes music store in addition to buying books, movies, podcasts and more and you are addicted to how convenient it is to buy media at your fingertips. So keep adding and adding more media into your iTunes library and keep forgetting where to search and find the music you imported last week or movies you downloaded 2 months ago. So it’s serious time to learn how to organize your media in your iTunes library to make it easier to find them.
Your iTunes music library can hold an infinite amount of songs, movies, books and more but it really depends on how much space you have on your computers hard drive if that’s where you have the files stored or it depends on how much space is on your external hard drive if that’s where you have your media or songs imported to. I prefer the external hard drive, as that’s where I have my iTunes save mostly music (168, 463 mp3s) on a 2 TB (terabytes) size hard drive, which is ¾ full! But if you have a quarter of the amount of files as I do it’s still difficult to organize it since you are dealing with hundreds and thousands of songs. If your iTunes library is increasing at a rapid rate then it’s time to think about organizing it so that it makes it easy to find your music or other media quicker. If iTunes is not organized then even finding a very recognizable song like Vogue by Madonna will be difficult.
How To Browse Your iTunes Library Media
When you have iTunes launched, on the left hand panel (see photo below) you will see options such as Music, Movies, TV Shows, Radio (see photo below)
as well as options for Podcasts, Books, Apps and Ringtones which you can select to either display or not display by going to Edit > Preferences on a Windows computer or iTunes > Preferences on a Mac. Make sure the General Tab is highlighted (see photo below) and pick and choose, select and or deselect the different options you want on or off then save to accept those changes.
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When you’ve selected MUSIC basically you’ll be seeing the music that you have imported into iTunes or purchased music from the iTunes Store. When you’ve selected MOVIES on the left panel of selections (see photo above) you’ll be seeing the movies you’ve purchased and downloaded from the iTunes Store. Now if you don’t have any movies then you wont see anything in there. And the same goes with TV SHOWS, PODCASTS, BOOKS, APPS, RINGTONES and so on. Each selection will display that particular media that you have available in your iTunes. So we’ll be focusing on these section and mostly MUSIC because iTunes is mostly for music but you have the options of adding additional media that you can enjoy on the computer or take with you on any iDevice such as the iPhone, iPad or iPod!
When you have selected MUSIC you can browse all your music using four different browse modes. (see picture below)
Cover Flow Mode (my favorite – far right button) allows you to browse through your music with the album covers nice and large. It helps to have your album covers added to all your music. If you’re looking for an automatic album cover adder check this out software program that adds all the album covers to all your music automatically. Because what’s the point of the Cover Flow Mode if you don’t have any album covers to look at? But having the album covers is not just for the Cover Flow Mode it works for viewing your songs in every mode. It just helps to have those beautiful album covers present in your music in iTunes. (see picture below)
Grid Mode (next to the Cover Flow Mode button) allows you to browse through your music as just album covers just as quick thumbnails you can click on and listen to. Each song will have it’s own album cover thumbnail that you can click on. You can change the view here and view the music as Artists as it’s defaulted to Albums and also have options to view Genres and Composers.
Album List Mode shows your music sorted by album along with the album cover art as a small thumbnail. This unfortunately is my least favorite mode In iTunes.
List Mode is your default view mode in iTunes and basically it lists all songs in a row and you can view/sort your music as albums, by dates, by artists, by genre’s, by bit rate, by date added or date modified, track number, in alphabetical order and so on. It’s my favorite browsing mode and I use it most because Cover Flow Mode even though I love slows down the computer with my quantity of songs.
So this is it you can start enjoying your music however you want using iTunes, the most advance music player application around.
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