MP3 players: Getting started with your MP3 player Apple iTunes help and advice

If you own an Apple iPod MP3 player or listen to music on your PC or Mac, then the chances are you've downloaded the latest version of iTunes.

But are you making the most of it? Follow our tips below to unlock iTunes’ hidden potential and get more from your digital music library.

You can shrink the iTunes window to regain space on your desktop

iTunes on your taskbar

If you want to clear your Windows desktop, but listen to music in the background as you work, you can set iTunes to show as a mini player on the taskbar that runs along the bottom of your screen.

Right-click anywhere on the taskbar, go to Toolbars and click iTunes from the list that appears.

Now, when you click the minimise button in the top-right corner of the main iTunes window, it will shrink down to a small set of controls on your taskbar as shown.

View your music in different ways

iTunes offers a selection of different views for browsing your music library. In the top toolbar, just to the left of the Search box you’ll see three buttons labelled View.

The first one gives a List of your music in simple text format in the main window. The middle button displays a small thumbnail of the album’s sleeve art next to the tracks, or a 'Gridview' layout of album covers in iTunes 8.

The final button displays Cover Flow, which lets you flip through the album sleeves as if they were a virtual record collection.

Click the square button in the bottom-right of the Cover Flow window to enlarge it to full screen.

Browse thumbnails of the album covers in your collection using iTunes Grid view

Sort out your music collection

You can sort the songs in your main library or playlist in different ways by clicking the column headings.

For instance, if you want to list all the tracks in your library alphabetically by artist name, click the word Artist at the top of the artist column. Click it again and iTunes will sort the library into reverse artist order.

You can customise which headings are shown by right-clicking on any column heading and selecting New Criteria from the list that appears.

Get cover artwork for your favourite album tracks

If you’re missing a lot of cover artwork for your tracks, you can set iTunes to add it automatically.

You’ll need to set up an account with the iTunes Store first, but once you’ve done so, simply go to Advanced > get Album Artwork. The process can take a while if you have a big library.

Once it’s finished, you may find that many of your albums still don’t have any artwork associated with them. This is normal, as iTunes isn’t able to retrieve artwork for any albums it doesn’t stock in its own store.

How to add missing cover artwork for rarer tracks

It’s possible to manually add cover artwork by going to Amazon and searching for the relevant album.

On the main Amazon web page for the album, right-click the picture of the album sleeve and select Copy from the menu that appears. Then go to iTunes and select the whole album by clicking the first track, holding down the Shift button on your keyboard and clicking the last track.

Now right-click your selection and choose Get Info from the menu. Right-click in the Artwork box and select Paste to add the picture to all the tracks at once.

Creating playlists to add to your MP3 player

Create your own playlists by going to File > New Playlist and typing in a name.

Now click on Music in the Library column on the left and add songs by dragging and dropping tracks onto the name of your playlist on the left, then you can synch them to your MP3 player.

You don’t have to add them in order, as you can always re-order them by clicking on the playlist to open it and dragging tracks up or down as required.

Any playlist you create can be burned to a CD too. Just click on the playlist name, insert a blank disc and click the Burn Disc button at the bottom right of the iTunes window.

The iTunes Genius feature

Genius function (new in iTunes 8)

Apple’s Genius function makes playlists from songs in your library that go great together, and recommends music from the iTunes Store that you don't already have.

It looks at your existing music collection and makes suggestions of other tracks that might appeal. This works in two ways - first, it will make playlists from tracks in your current library that it thinks will match a selected song, and then it will go online to suggest new tracks that you can buy.

Its recommendations are displayed in a sidebar and include:

• Top albums Bestselling albums that Genius recommends
• Songs you are missing Usually popular songs by the same artist
• iTunes essentials Collections of music featured in the iTunes store
• Recommendations Tracks by other artists you might like

If you don't find Genius useful, or like the idea of sending your data to Apple, you can turn off Genius by going to the Store menu and clicking on Turn Off Genius.

Extra settings

Go to Edit > Preferences and you’ll discover lots of useful settings to play with. If you’re finding text hard to read, for example, you can select Large from the drop-down menus next to both Source Text and Song Text under the General tab.

Click the Playback tab and you can experiment with Sound Enhancer, Sound Check and Crossfade settings or alter the way that the Shuffle mode operates.

Advanced settings

Still in the Preferences dialogue box, click the Advanced tab. Here you’ll find three more sub-tabs.

Under General you can specify the location of the iTunes music folder by clicking the Change button – useful if you like to keep your music stored on a separate hard disk, for example.

Under the Importing tab you can specify the quality and format of the music files iTunes creates when it rips your CDs.

The final tab, Burning, lets you select a recordable CD or DVD drive and allows you to specify whether you want to create Audio CDs (that can play in any normal CD player), MP3 CDs (which can be played in MP3-compatible CD/DVD players and other computers) or plain data CDs when you burn playlists.