I thought I’d throw together a collection of my favorite half-dozen overlooked iTunes UI features. These range from the fairly unobvious to the very unobvious, so your mileage may vary from mine. Feel free to add your own personal suggestions to the comments.
Move your cursor to either of the history navigation arrows at the top-left of the central iTunes display. Clicking either arrow moves you forward or backward one screen in your iTunes Music Store history. To skip within the history list, press and hold the mouse for a second until the individual history pop-up shown here appears. Select any item to move directly to that page.
iTunes can play back any video that you can watch in QuickTime. DivX or Xvid or other codecs installed for QuickTime work in iTunes. They will not, however, play back on your iPod. To convert a video, Control-click (right-click) a video and select Convert Selection for iPod from the contextual menu that appears. It can take a non-trivial amount of time to convert, for example, a 2-hour AVI movie to an iPod-compatible version.
When you are in the middle of several tasks–for example, updating an iPod, downloading podcasts, playing music, etc.–the small right triangle in the gray circle found in the main status window allows you to switch between each kind of display such as the main scrub bar, the beat box, or download and iPod update progress. The triangle appears only when there’s more than one display to choose from.
Double-clicking on the small icon to the left of any item in the source column opens a new iTunes window with that item (playlist, music store, etc) displayed. The windows float freely and can be individually minimized, closed, etc. You can also drag and drop items between windows, allowing you to select some items from one playlist while looking at another playlist at the same time.
The arrow icons found to the right of track names, artist names and album names automatically search the Music Store for those names. It doesn’t matter whether you purchased the track from the iTMS or not.
iTunes offers many more tags and columns than the default presentation suggests. To add custom columns (such as Track Number, Year, Composer, Bit Rate, Beats Per Minute, etc), Control-click (right-click) on any column header text and select the column you wish to display or hide. Selecting either autosize option will resize column widths in order to display text without cropping.
If you option-click on the circled arrow next to a track it'll immediately take you to that song in your Library. Furthermore, you can toggle the behavior by way of the shell command "defaults write com.apple.iTunes invertStoreLinks -bool YES". For playlist-heavy setups, this is a godsend.
The gray arrow that lets you toggle your way through the display is useful, but mainly I find it annoying as iTunes keeps changing the display when I'm looking for something specific (like, how is my progress during my iPod update going?). I think it should behave differently based upon if I clicked it or not, as it would be more useful to me then :)
The video playback window needs to be a first-class window. It's way too easy to loose it. Why isn't it available in the "Window" drop down menu? Once Apple corrects that, maybe they can do something about the jittery playback, and perhaps not black out my other monitors when playing videos full screen. Or just use play everything in a separate QuickTime window. That's my iTunes rant for the day.
My favorite iTunes interface feature may also be its most subtle. When iTunes is not in "mini-player" mode, clicking on the forward/back/play/pause buttons brings iTunes to the front and makes it the active application. But when iTunes is in mini mode, clicking on these buttons performs their given action without focusing iTunes. So if you're writing a blog entry, for example, and want to skip a song, you just click on the mini-iTune's "next" button and keep on typing! No need to click on your browser again.
What would be really helpful is if I could 'see' whether a certain track in the iTunes Music Store is already in my library. So often I am browsing the iTMS and don't remember whether I already own a certain track. Maybe pressing option should switch all the grey circled arrows into coloured ones to show that those tracks in the iTMS are already in my library. Wouldn't that be cool? We don't even need to wasted an extra column for that.
Great! thank you!!
Wow, used the right click on the gray arrow and it got me to a library search view. How does one go back to the original view?
Thanks
Never mind...
You can NOT playback anything in itunes that will play in quicktime player. I have several xvid avi movies that quicktime player cranks through fine but itunes won't touch (or import in anyway).
I'd love it if someone could point out something I'm missing, cause I'd love to have them in front row...