The Awesome Uselessness Of CDs On Demand

So I was sitting around the house, buying CDs, or at least trying to buy a CD. Thing is, the band in question ("Denial Machine", it's not really important), a small American band, didn't seem to have actually released their album on CD in the UK. Sure, there was a download available, but no sign of the CD in the usual long-tail internet retailers. So before grudgingly accepting a lower-quality download, I tried Amazon in the states, just to see what the import price might be. And in addition to the usual CD and MP3 sources, they offered a "CD on demand" version. You buy, they burn the lossless files to a disc, print artwork, and ship across the Atlantic. Awesome. Except, it's kind of unnecessary. Got me thinking, "why no lossless download?". After all, there are sites out there offering music in nice high-bitrate CD-quality lossless.

The reasons for stores sticking to offering MP3 (or AAC) downloads are probably something like:

1. Offering downloads in a single format reduces customer confusion
2. MP3 is a popular universal format
3. Niche lossless formats typically require more knowledge or specialised software, which means more customer support
4. Most people, with their combination of ears and equipment, struggle to tell the difference between higher bitrate lossy (MP3) and lossless, so MP3 is fine
5. Lossless versions of files take three times as much space to store, a valid consideration for a store with many thousand albums selling in small numbers

The last point is obviously no longer valid when you have to store the lossless masters for your on-demand printing anyway. Got me thinking "what else stops them cutting out printing a CD?".

What about piracy/DRM? Not an issue, the CD is basically DRM-free WAVs, I'm only going to rip to FLAC and stuff the CD on a shelf, and not share the files around because I'm a nice guy. And anyway, the MP3s are DRM-free.

Offering lossless downloads means you have to start explaining the difference between lossy and lossless. You probably have to price accordingly, which means explaining why your "lower quality and no distribution costs" MP3 version currently costs the same as the CD, or pricing the lossless above the CD for delivery convenience. And your nice simple two-format "CD or download" options become confusing. This is a likely motive. Incidentally, Play.com seem to get by just fine offering downloads in both 256kbps and 320kbps.

Lossless files are big. Means long download times. Again, a possible reason. If you're on dial-up.

Thing is, I know the issues with buying lossless music, I'm OK with the higher prices. I'd really rather buy lossless directly than wait a month for Amazon to burn the lossless files to a disc and ship them (at great cost) so I can re-construct them on my hard drive. Of course, I'd probably be denied the ability to buy a download from a US site that has a store in my country anyway.

In the end, I bought the original CD, on import. It'll take a few weeks, but it's better quality and (postage costs aside) as cheap as buying the lossy download over here.

Look, the DIY approach of just getting your music out there and not relying on a record company to distribute it is great, and more or less necessary. And I understand that most people have accepted that lossy downloads are "good enough". Maybe one day I'll forget how things were in the 1990s and do the same.

CDs on demand are still better than lossy downloads, especially if all the nasty rumours about record companies trying to ditch CDs in favour of downloads are true. But please, everyone, consider just selling us music in 1990s/CD quality bitrate.

iTunes: Beware The "Keep Media Folder Organised" Option

There's a choice to be made when it comes to deciding where your music is stored and who's responsible for managing this - you or iTunes. Unfortunately, unlike most iTunes options, it's difficult to change your mind later, and not understanding or respecting the decision you make about this can lead to disaster (as in a "music being randomly deleted" disaster).

I used to think it was obvious - just let iTunes manage stuff. After a number of arguments with various people on discussion forums, I've realised that there probably isn't a single correct way to do things, it all depends on where iTunes fits as part of your music management strategy.

The Big Red File Organisation Button

So first of all, we're dealing with two iTunes preferences. The settings are in the edit->preferences->advanced dialog under "iTunes media folder location". You'll want to check or uncheck "keep iTunes media folder organised" and "copy files to iTunes media folder when adding to library". In most cases, you'll set both to the same checked/unchecked setting (but do read on before deciding).

This dialog also tells you where your files live (if iTunes is managing them). Alternatively, inspect the properties of a track ("get info") if you can't find it.

Letting iTunes Manage Your Music

Unless you really really need to, because your tunes are also managed and used by another application, I'd recommend you let iTunes do the work. If you go and "keep iTunes media folder organised" it'll automatically file music in a single "iTunes Music" folder, sorting tracks into an "artist/album" folder structure, mirroring any tag changes in the file/folder names.

It makes sense, if you're letting iTunes manage what your files are called and where they go, to have iTunes copy any imported tracks into the iTunes music folder - ensure the "copy files to iTunes media folder when adding to library" option is ticked.

I use this approach, but then I use iTunes to manage a secondary, portable copy of my library, primarily for feeding my iPod and iPad. The key advantages of this approach are that your file and folder structure represents your library (so you can find your files), and your files get stored in a single location.

You can even use this option to make sense of a messy library, turning "one big folder of MP3s" into a nice organised folder structure (assuming your tags are correct). Do make sure you have a back-up of your original files first though.

Managing Your Music Yourself

Leave the options off and iTunes will leave your files alone. Whatever you change when editing file info in iTunes, the filename, folder and location will remain unaffected. This is absolutely the way to go if you have other applications relying on these files, or if you just don't trust iTunes.

Don't Cross The Streams, That Would Be Bad

Be VERY careful when switching from one approach to the other. If you have the music management option switched off, turning it back on has been known to delete files (maybe they're known to iTunes but not in the iTunes music folder, or they're now squatting illegally in the iTunes library folder), so best to back up your files before radically restructuring your library.

The Big Decision

It's worth realising that letting iTunes manage your files isn't some kind of "nanny mode", and it doesn't hide the details (you can still go explore the files on your hard drive). It's just a question of which option works best for you.

• Letting iTunes manage your files - if you use iTunes as your primary application for browsing, managing and playing your files (or the "portable" versions of your files if you're like me and keep an additional lossless library) then yes, let iTunes manage your files.
• If you play, manage and tag your files in other application(s) and only use iTunes to feed your iPod, and maybe as an occasional music shop and player, then turn this off and don't let iTunes mess with your files.

Setting Up Sonos To Tweet

How's this for taking an idea to it's (il)logical conclusion. A few days ago I had friends over, and of course the Sonos was on and the playlist was fed with all sorts of stuff. Some songs even got that "who was that, I should check them out" reaction. So I thought I'd be nice and just email the playlist. Which wasn't going to work. While I can save the "currently playing" queue as a playlist, Sonos saves playlists in its own format on the Sonos itself. And with no export option, you have to resort to old-fashioned techniques of writing it down or screen-grabbing to get a "you have been listening to" report. And then I noticed Sonos's Twitter integration feature...

Guessing that I could try getting the Sonos to just tweet to a protected Twitter account (some music preferences are not for sharing to all) and pick up playlist info when I needed it, I went and set one up. Easy, just go register one with Twitter. Needed an email address too, but no problem, I just used one of the spare accounts I keep around for signing up and collecting spam. A quick visit to the Sonos menus to hook up the new Twitter account and everything was ready. Except, Mr. Sonos doesn't seem to want to tweet automatically.

Really, all you get is a very basic Twitter client on your Sonos controller (which a lot of the time will be a laptop or tablet/smartphone with its own better Twitter client). You can get Sonos to tweet the name of the current song/artist, but that's about all. It can be four or five clicks to get Sonos to tweet what's playing just using the in-built tweet templates, and they're really boring. You can't change them to include other tags like the album name, or to personalise them. They suggest a generic #Sonos (rather than something like #PlayingOnMySonos) hashtag to make tracking of Sonos conversations on Twitter that bit harder. And they even suggest a "X is playing all over my house" tweet when something is only playing in one zone, which is a bit dumb. So if you don't want tedious tweets, you have to type them yourself. Which defeats the point of the machine doing the tweeting.

So back to the original plan - to get a list of what's just been playing off the Sonos. It doesn't seem to be possible, without resorting to advanced technology like the pen. The best I can probably get is to use the Sonos to pre-populate a tweet when something interesting comes on, and then check the tweets later.

Anyway, I have a machine in my house hooked up to Twitter, but that's probably the end of the experiment. I might leave the account running though, just to see if any other machines want to be friends with a little white box in my living room....

The Trouble With Digital Music Distribution

Despite living in the download era and having a whole networked music streaming home setup and an iPod, I still buy CDs. I rarely listen to them - they go straight onto the streamer (Sonos) and then they sit on a shelf - but I still like buying CDs. They're the highest bitrate you can buy (for most releases), and they have packaging with artwork and a back cover and inlay that expands the graphic design concept for the release, sleeve notes, lyric sheets etc. Occasionally I'll buy digital stuff if it's the only way it's available (eg. digital-only singles and EPs, live show downloads), but for albums it's CD all the way, really out of necessity.

So I recently participated in an experiment with the new Radiohead record (King of Limbs). They were offering it as a lossless download, and six weeks before the physical release. Same price as a CD from an internet retailer, but with none of the manufacturing or distribution chain taking a cut. And of course, no reliance on the postman or a trip to the shops. Anyway, I figured I'd try it. The results were slightly disappointing: the music, well that's pretty cool minimalistic electronic noodling, but the distribution needs more thought.

I'm writing this from the perspective of someone who remembers actually going to a record store and buying music on real actual bits of plastic and generally having something that represents the sounds coming from the speakers. If you grew up on planet download then skip this and go trawl the iTunes store and torrent sites.

Here's what's wrong with Radiohead's approach, and what really needs to change before I'll change my buying habits.

• The Format. The download is available in two flavours: MP3 (high 320kbps bitrate but still compressed) or WAV (pretty universal but no tagging info). If it's available in CD quality 1400kbps, that's what I want. The lack of a decent lossless format option (eg. FLAC) is baffling. Metallica, Bad Religion, NIN etc. have shown the way by providing FLAC downloads. OK, the WAV came in a ZIP so the download isn't huge (probably the same size as the FLAC would have been) but WAV is just a terrible format, because there's no tagging info and the files are huge. There's track numbers and song titles in the filenames, and that's it. I had to waste my time with Foobar pasting tagging info into the tracks so my player (Sonos) had something to work with. And really, after ten years of digital music files, I just expect them to have tagging info. It's actually less effort for me to unwrap a CD and rip it with EAC than to deal with a bundle of WAV files. CD 1, digital 0.
  
• What's In The Box? So I have the music and whatever track titles I can ascertain from filenames, and a nice hi-res JPEG of the front cover artwork, and that's it. No equivalent of the sleeve or booklet. Hell, I'm used to getting those digital booklet PDFs with downloads from the iTunes store. The MP3 release is apparently the same (don't know for sure). Maybe Radiohead want to give you the music and nothing else to distract from it, maybe they think booklets are relics for physical releases, maybe the music's ready but the design (apart from the front cover artwork) is still pending. Whatever, CD 2, digital 0.
  
• The Shop. When I buy music, I can go to online retailers like Amazon, Play, iTunes Store, or real places like HMV or the local independent record shop, wherever. I had to go to Radiohead's own store to buy this (or wait six weeks until it's everywhere). Not just Radiohead's store actually (the way that most bands have a store these days), but Radiohead's "store for buying this one record". And sign up and enter my credit card details and all that. And any savings from cutting out the middlemen, well I don't see them. A record is still worth it for the nine bucks I paid, but when I'm getting less of an experience than the CD and I appear to be paying fewer people for that privilege, well it's hard to champion going straight to the band for what feels like a "paid for torrent". CD 3, digital 0.
  

Bits Of Plastic

Hey, music is all just digital files, and if I could get the digital equivalent of those shelves full of CDs I would, but I can't help feel a little underwhelmed by this release. A "live bootleg" download is one thing, a studio album is something else. I suppose the inlay info is a web search away, but paying for a bunch of music-and-nothing-else files is still an adjustment. In some ways, this release reminds me of my early music listening days when I'd have a C-90 cassette of an album with just the music and maybe the tracklisting scrawled on the case (although the download is better quality and the band now gets paid).

Digital music distribution has mostly been a story of missed opportunities, from low quality broken formats winning out, to the devaluing of the album experience (no artwork/booklet/package and the cherry-picking of tracks onto playlists). The bandwidth is there for lossless (downloads if not streaming), even if most people are happy with their music compressed and low-quality and playing through tiny speakers. Even if most music playing applications aren't really equipped to handle a track in multiple formats, the biggest record store in the world (iTunes store) showed potential with the "iTunes plus" dual-format idea, slow upping of the available quality, and recent rumours of higher quality formats. And what's stopping someone like Amazon offering a record in CD, MP3-with-PDF and FLAC-with-PDF?

Right now there's all sorts of rumours going around about apple and possible 24-bit masters either cropping up in the iTunes store, or being used as the source for 256kbps MP3s, or something. Certainly a "better than CD" quality format would be welcome, but as persuading the vast majority to upgrade from low-quality MP3s to the 25-year-old CD format is hard, don't see it happening soon.

So back to Radiohead. They get points for a lossless download option. But it's not enough. The WAV format choice is just wrong and the lack of any booklet or package is infuriating. You have to assume Radiohead considered why people still buy CDs when deciding on a lossless download. MP3 isn't enough for music fans like me. We want the "CD without having to reach for the physical CD" experience on our home music servers. When will bands/labels start properly catering for us?

Ripping Hidden Tracks and Partial Tracks From CDs

Normally when you rip a CD, you just rip whole tracks or albums. However, there are times when you might want to be a bit more selective about which bits of a track you rip. CDs aren't always mastered as "one song per track", hidden tracks and other playback inconsistencies don't really fit well with the "one song, one file" digital music approach.

So you might want to "fix" your CDs as you rip them to:

1. Save space - if you're storing at a constant bitrate, silence costs as much as music (not really a problem with variable bitrates), hidden tracks that you never listen to also don't have to live inside the final track and can be left off your iPod
2. Make playback easier by creating a "one track one song" version
3. Fix issues where song intros end up on previous tracks

This isn't an easy thing to do, it thankfully isn't an issue on most CDs, but if you absolutely want perfection from your digital music library...

Hidden Tracks

The most obvious scenario is the often-used "hidden track" at the end of some CDs. Nirvana's Nevermind is a classic example - the final 20-minute track contains not just the final 4-minute song ("Something In The Way"), but a long period of silence followed before the final droning noise of "Endless Nameless". So rather than ripping as-is, you might want to hack out the silence and have your ripped copy be 13 songs, with the "hidden" track not-so-hidden and the track times slightly more representative of what's going on.

Mastering Issues

Sometimes CDs play with where the index markers go (ever seen those negative timers?) so the intro to one song appears at the end of the previous track (random example: my two pressings of Iron Maiden's "Powerslave" disagree over which CD track the intro to the title track belongs in). Occasionally, CDs just make mistakes. It's nice to have the option of fixing things so they work better on a digital music jukebox.

Fixes

Thankfully, you don't have to live with your ripping software's initial assessment of how a CD is structured (and anyway, a CD is just a continuous piece of music with a load of index markers for where the tracks start and end). Listed below are a couple of strategies for fixing things, although you will have to make a note of the times of where stuff starts and ends if you want to tweak tracks using these approaches.

Partial Rips - Telling The Ripping Where The Tracks Are

One of CDex's killer features is the "extract partial track" option. You might have to do some finding of files and re-tagging them afterwards (files tend to get dumped, un-numbered, outside the artist/album folder you normally rip to), but you can bring up the "extract partial track" option, set where you want the track to start and end (which can be somewhere in another track!), and then go rip.

EAC has a similar "copy range" feature - see this post on EAC.

Audio Editing

You can always use an audio editing program (I recommend Audacity) to glue together or separate out tracks. You might have to do your editing with WAVs (in which case you'll have to re-tag afterwards). This is not really an option if you're ripping direct to MP3 (you'll be compressing, uncompressing for edit then re-compressing), but if you do keep a lossless copy around, there's no problem trimming things. You can always take those FLACs, edit them and re-save, and not lose any quality.

How To Buy An MP3 Player

"What MP3 player should I buy?"

Every week I see someone on a forum posting a variation on the "what MP3 player should I buy?" question. Which in itself is a variation on the "what TV/car/pet-monkey" question we all get asked from time to time. And in many cases, the person asking the question fails to elaborate on their requirements.

"So really, what MP3 player should I buy?"

Buy an iPod touch. They play music (very well as it happens). They sound good (if you use decent headphones and avoid low bitrates). You can use them to surf and tweet and play Angry Birds. They're easy to use. They look cool. And if you need massive capacity or music only, look at the classic/nano iPods. Are we done?

"But I don't want to be a clone / hate iTunes / need a removable battery / have to play some obscure format / want to be able to drag-and-drop directly onto the player"

Ok, now you're getting somewhere. Questions you should be asking:

• What are you going to use it for? Music? Videos? Internet? Apps?
• Do you need a dedicated music-playing gadget, or do you want music to be one of the things your smartphone does?
• What capacity? How big is your collection? How big will it be in two years' time? How much space do you want to leave for stuff that isn't music?
• Do you need gapless playback? If you listen to albums or remember ancient technologies like CD, then yes, this is something you want to consider. Very few players support gapless, so this might be something you'll have to compromise on. If all you'll ever do is shuffle or use your own playlists, you can probably live with the player inserting extra gaps between songs.
• What formats will you be playing? Do you have music/videos in obscure formats? Can you convert your files to something your player can handle (if your music is in lossless then yes, conversion is easy, otherwise this is an issue)? Can you be bothered converting to the best format for your player?
• Do you need to be able to manage it with direct folder access or otherwise have an irrational phobia of iTunes (or a perfectly rational fear of Sonic Stage)? Do you need to be able to manage it from multiple PCs? If your library is bigger than your player's capacity, managing what's on the player by direct file-copying only could be a challenge.
• What's your definition of "sound quality"? And will you be bringing the bitrate and headphones to get the best out of it?
• What about battery life? Will the normal battery-saving tricks of dimming the screen and turning off wi-fi be enough, or do you need to be able to swap-out the battery?
• How much do you want to spend?

Ok, now you can ask questions, determine the necessities and nice-to-haves, draw up a shortlist, and figure out what player works for you. Incidentally, for me, gapless playback was the dealbreaker that saw me buy players from Rio, Sony and Apple. And remember to budget for some decent headphones and a case, because these days you probably won't get much in the box (actually, I once got decent Sennheiser headphones and a dock bundled as standard with a player, but it was a Rio. And 2004).

"Not buying an iPod. The end."

OK, many people don't want an iPod, for understandable and not-so-understandable reasons. I've seen people claim that they won't entertain the prospect of an iPod touch because it's "an iPhone without the phone" rather than "a music player with touch screen, video, wi-fi, etc". Whatever, if "must not be player X regardless of how suitable it may be" is your number one requirement, at least you're narrowing your shortlist.

I'm not actually answering the question here. I'm not the one buying a new toy. But do think of your requirements before asking a very general question. Or just play safe and buy an iPod.

iTunes: Feeding A Small iPod From A Big Library

Unless your iPod/iPad/iPhone easily holds all the music in your library, or you want iTunes to decide what you carry around with you, you'll want to be selective about what you load onto your iPod. There's a relatively easy way to do this, and then you can use all that saved time to laugh at everyone who insisted on a player that gets fed by dragging and dropping files.

So first, the basics: iTunes keeps track of what you want to copy from your local iTunes library onto your iPod/iPad/iPhone etc. Plug your iPod in and a new set of management screens appears, split into sections for music, movies, apps etc. Each time you connect and do a "sync", stuff is added to or removed from your iPod according to what you told iTunes to copy onto it (a separate set for each device, if you have say an iPhone and an iPad). You can go in and tell iTunes to sync selected playlists, albums, artists, genres etc.

The problem with using this screen to manage your iPod is that it's a pain to constantly toggle individual albums or tracks on or off. And you can only get to this screen while your iPod is connected. Thankfully, there is a way to basically avoid this screen, and easily manage what's on your device without actually needing to physically plug it in (and yes, a new release of iOS may ultimately remove the need to plug your iPod in). If you are already managing your iPod this way (and I did see a mate managing music on his iPhone like this and it was horrifically unsustainable) then fear not. Just go to the music sync menu and un-tick everything until there's zero music selected (just watch the capacity bar down the bottom of the iTunes screen). Killed all your music? Good, now we can start.

First, create a playlist called something like "on my ipod". If you own multiple iPods/iPhones etc, you may need a playlist for each device. Now go to library->music and select items from your main library, drag-and-drop them onto this playlist. Select the playlist and start browsing the stuff on (or destined for) your iPod. This playlist is probably going to get quite big, so I'd go turn on the column browser and then you can use the playlist like a "mini library" of the stuff on your iPod.

If you're like me and juggle selections from 60GB of library onto a 32GB iPod, you'll want to delete stuff so you can add new purchases, so just go to the "on iPod" playlist and delete tracks, albums, whole artists. Note this doesn't delete the music, just removes it from the playlist. And as the only unit of iTunes music currency is a "track", you can delete chunks of an album (eg. the bonus live/demo tracks) from the portable playlist to save space.

OK, this solution doesn't solve all your problems - specifically, if you build and use a lot of playlists, you could be back to manual management, because you'll have to tell iTunes to sync several (or all) playlists, and the more playlists you have, the more likely that there are songs that aren't on your big "on iPod" playlist, and it becomes a less and less-accurate guide of what's likely to get copied. Don't have a solution for this yet, I'm mostly an "entire albums" guy, so I don't have much use for playlists anyway.

You will need to watch the size of such a playlist (go to your "on iPod" playlist, select "all artists, all albums" from the column browser and check filesize at the bottom of the iTunes window), and keep this a little under the supposedly available free space - annoyingly, iTunes won't warn you. If you find that some recently added tracks (usually the first track of an album) are missing, you've run out of space. The good thing is, managing what's on your iPod this way is easy - just remove something you're unlikely to want to listen to from the playlist (that's deleting tracks from the playlist, not the library) and re-sync.

Ultimately this "on iPod" playlist is just a playlist like any other, we're just cheating and using it as a way of managing a second library of songs. In the synchronise options, set to only synchronise the iPod with this one playlist. The changes get replicated when you plug-in your iPod. You are now using iTunes to easily manage what's on your iPod.

iTunes Tips And Tricks

iTunes is many things - a music/video player, a tool for converting, organising and browsing a music library, a way for managing and loading things onto your iPod/iPad/iPhone. I've noticed quite a few people who don't realise all the crazy things iTunes can do (or at least the various keyboard controls and options), so here's some random possibly useful tips and tricks for managing your music with iTunes. Not an exhaustive list, but it might help. These notes refer to iTunes 10 on PC, and cover the iTunes application for music management and playback (not the iTunes Store).

Browsing And Playing Your Tunes

Main view

The main window is a list of tracks. To start with, this is everything in your library. Use the column browser to filter down to just an artist/album. Right-click the columns to decide which tags get shown. Drag-and-drop columns to re-size or re-order. Left-click a column to sort by that tag, but watch as it's easy to screw stuff up this way. Right-click in the LHS album column and "sort album by title" is a good reset.

Note also the track/time/filesize count at the bottom of the window, very useful for figuring out how big your library is, or playlist/album length.

Column Browser

This lets you select by artist/album/genre, and generally filter or navigate your library. Turn on the "column browser" (View->Column Browser->Show/Hide or use CTRL-B to toggle), then right-click somewhere in the column headings to show/hide selected columns. I recommend Artists and albums as a minimum. This gives you the artist/album browsing you get with your iPod, and just about all other music software. And by selecting "all" in any column, you get a count of the number of artists/albums etc you have for the selected artists - set "all" in all columns to get counts for your entire library. Column browser can be toggled on/off for main library and individual playlists (yes there are reasons why you might have a massive playlist requiring such a browser, such as this).

View Buttons

The four view buttons top right affect the library or current playlist view in very different ways:

• Song List - shows a list of all tracks (filtered if column browser on)
• Album List - modified version of "song list" with tracks grouped by album, artwork in LHS column
• Grid - album covers, no visible tracklisting, slider controls image size and number of covers displayed
• Cover Flow - two panel view, covers and song list, similar to flipping an iPod 90 degrees, no column browser

Playlists

Do "file->new playlist" to create. If you want to organise things, "file->new playlist folder" creates the folder, select the folder first to create new playlists in that folder, and drag/drop playlists into folders. Drag any single/multiple selected tracks (or even whole albums) from the library view or column browser onto a playlist to add (options also available bt right-clicking and doing an "add to playlist").

Playlists do contain a "track order in this playlist" pseudo-tag in the far LHS column. It won't show up in the track info properties, but it can be used to control the tracklist order, so if you're carefully crafting a mixtape and you accidentally click the artist column heading, you should be able to retrieve your intended tracklisting.

Smart Playlists

These are basically saved searches - your playlist changes as you add stuff to your library. iTunes adds a few examples (top rated, recently added) as default. Some random examples I like:

• Songs with the word "dog" in the title
• Songs from a specific year - just set the date range. Useful for finding what came out this year.
• Untagged - search where artist is "". Useful for finding any songs with missing tagging info.
• High/low bitrate - search where bitrate is greater/less than 192.
• Most played - "Media Kind" is not podcast, "Plays" is greater than zero, limit to say 25 items selected by "most often played". Works for tracks, but if you're a "whole albums" fan, add a "track number is 1" filter to get a good approximation of what your favourite albums are.

Just right-click and edit a smart playlist to tweak the search criteria.

Sharing Playlists With Other Applications

You can export a playlist in different formats eg. text, CSV, M3U - standard M3U playlists list the files (in the playlist order shown when you export) and can be opened and played in any other music player (eg. Foobar). Not tried importing yet.

Playing Your Tunes

If you actually want to use iTunes as a music player, well the playlist is whatever's listed in the main window (an album, playlist, library full of tracks). You have play/pause, next/previous track, a track position slider, volume controls, and you can run as large or minimal (CTRL-M) window. Not much more to say, really.

Playing files in your iTunes library outside of iTunes

A typical scenario - using iTunes to manage your library and feed your iPod, but pointing a music streamer to those files for playing in the house. Just find the file(s) and either play from there or copy it to your other library (get track info or check your iTunes library location in the preferences). I feed my Sonos this way for adding stuff I can only buy as low-bitrate MP3 to my main library (mostly FLAC).

Crossfading

Annoyingly, the crossfade option is under the "Edit->Preferences->Playback" settings, so it's hard to toggle on/off. Use crossfading to smash tracks into each other for your own playlist mixes or when shuffling to get continuous music, but it shouldn't ever be used if listening to albums. And you don't need to do the crossfading hack as a workaround for gapless...

Gapless playback

Yes, iTunes is gapless! This is really awesome (or just "minimum standard" if you were alive in the 90s). No nasty adding extra gaps between songs, you get exactly what was on the CD (unless you're crossfading).

iTunes (and also iPods) even do gapless playback of "non-gapless" formats like MP3 and AAC - it does this by figuring out exactly how long the tracks should be (a traditional blocker on gapless playback) when songs are ripped/converted/imported. Note that any extra track length information iTunes finds to enable gapless playback is stored in the iTunes library, not in the actual track, so just because a track plays gaplessly in iTunes, you aren't guaranteed correct playback in some other application.

Managing Your Tunes

Importing tracks from elsewhere

So you can populate your library with iTunes purchases. You can get tracks by ripping CDs, except you should use a better ripper (eg. EAC). You can also just add tracks you bought, ripped or otherwise found elsewhere. Just do a "File->Add File/Folder to Library". If iTunes is managing your files and copying imported stuff, then iTunes will copy the files into your "iTunes Music" folder under whatever artist/album they're tagged as. Best thing to do is keep a temp "iTunes import" directory around for this purpose - copy any new files into the import directory, fire up iTunes and do an import, then clean up the temp copies in the import directory. Of course, if you're managing files yourself, put them in the correct place before you add them to the library. See the "File Locations" section below for more.

File Info / Tagging

Having your stuff tagged is really important. Right-click on a track and select "get info" to see the tags and change them ("info" tab). Select a whole bunch of tracks and get info to do a "bulk tagging" operation, for those times when you want to change an album title, re-classify an album, list an artist consistently etc. All the tracks in the library, playlists etc. are referenced by an internal ID not track names, so you won't screw up a playlist if you rename a song.

Note that iTunes doesn't really "do" albums, it's all track-based, and an album is simply a collection of tracks that all have the same artist and album.

Artwork

If you have an iTunes store account, iTunes will try find artwork for you for your non-iTunes store imported tracks. Select and right-click on some tracks (eg. that album you just imported) and do a "get album artwork". The album cover grid view (top right by the search box) lets you find and select large groups of artwork-free albums.

There's also an "Automatically download missing artwork" option in the "Edit->Preferences->Store" settings.

If iTunes can't find the artwork (did you spell the artist/album title the way it is in the iTunes store?), or just gets it wrong, manually add your own by doing a "get info" on all the tracks in the album, selecting the "info" tab, and dragging the artwork file from an open file explorer window into the little artwork box. Ok the changes and watch as the artwork is applied. Of course, this means more effort to go find the artwork, but if you're just adding tracks you ripped elsewhere, you probably already have an artwork file.

Note that album artwork may be stored either embedded in the files, or, if you had to add the artwork within iTunes, it'll be somewhere in the "iTunes/Album Artwork" folder.

Ripping CDs / Importing

Don't use iTunes to rip CDs, it'll do quick, inaccurate rips (even with error correction turned on). Use EAC instead. However, it's worth noting that the current import settings (edit->preferences->general->import settings) apply to ripping CDs, converting to different formats, and importing from external programs (eg. iTunesEncoder).

Remote-controlling iTunes

iTunes actually has an API allowing external access, so you can use something like iTunesEncoder to drive the conversion/importing (something I do to get gapless AAC versions of my FLAC files into iTunes). This probably warrants its own post, but it's one more cool little feature.

Managing your iPod

See the post on Feeding a small iPod from a big library.

Where's My Stuff?

File Locations / Managing Files

You can either let iTunes manage where your files go, or you can manage it yourself. As this is a big decision, often debated buy guys on forums with nothing better to do (oh wait, that's me), I've given this topic its own post: Beware The "Keep Media Folder Organised" Option.

The settings are in the edit->preferences->advanced dialog: "iTunes media folder location", "keep iTunes media folder organised" and "copy files to iTunes media folder when adding to library". This dialog also tells you where your files live (if iTunes is managing them). Alternatively, inspect the properties of a track ("get info").

How The iTunes Library Is Stored

iTunes stores your library as both a series of ".itl", ".itdb" files, and a very large "iTunes Music Library.xml" file. You can open the XML file in a text editor and see how it works - each track has a unique ID and a series of values for each of the tagged fields (same as doing a "get info" on a track), each playlist is just a list of the track IDs.

Sometimes things go wrong and your database files get corrupted. iTunes does create a "Previous iTunes Libraries" folder, in the worst cases of corrupted ".itl" files you should be able to replace the broken library with one of these, but you will lose recent playlist changes.

Backups

The most basic backup is a backup of the music files. Simplest way to backup is to copy your entire iTunes music folder, if you have one. If your music is strewn all over your hard drives then things are more difficult, but then that's the choice you made. This only saves your music, so worst case (dead PC and a clean iTunes install), you'll have to do an "add folder to library" to suck all the files back in, and live with losing playlists, playcounts and artwork.

Better to copy the entire "iTunes" folder, to keep music files, artwork, and the "iTunes library" files.

Recovery

The most basic recovery is a fresh install of iTunes, a folder of all the previous MP3 etc files, and leaving an "add folder to library" running for an hour. You'd have to recreate any playlists, and all your playcounts/ratings/artwork are lost. A full recovery would involve using the old library files - I've never actually attempted this, so some RTFMing might be in order.

Bugs, Issues Etc

Album displayed twice

Sometimes, an album will be displayed as two different albums, eg. a copy of the album with the first track, and a copy of the album with all the other tracks. Sometimes, this is just tagging errors, making iTunes think the tracks belong to different albums. Sometimes it just seems like a bug. It's most obvious on the album list. One way to fix is to select all tracks on the album, get info, tick "artist", "album" and "year" fields (which probably look the same across all tracks on the two supposedly different albums), and OK your "changes", the song list should now display as a single album.

Not all of an album copied / track missing

iTunes does its best to sync everything you tell it to, but if you ask it to sync more than you have space for, it sometimes makes odd decisions. I mostly notice this when using my big "chunk of my big library that I want on my smaller iPod" playlist and having the whole playlist be what's copied to the iPod. Typically, I add an album, then when I go to play it, the first track (and strangely it's always the first track) is missing. Sadly, iTunes doesn't give you any kind of warning when it can't sync everything you asked it to - you have to manage that yourself. And to make matters worse, even when there's supposedly still "free space" shown when you view the iPod in iTunes, it seems that you can't use all the space.

iTunes and the iPod are not the same

The "iTunes app" used on iPods/iPhones is not identical to iTunes on PC/Mac. For example, iTunes seems to be fairly forgiving of case in tags, but an iPod (at least the first generation iPod touch) can get a bit confused between, say, "Alice In Chains" and "Alice in Chains", and start listing artists twice.

iTunes is slow and unresponsive

Sadly, when it comes to performance, iTunes is a big bloated mess. Deal with it, be patient, buy a faster PC, hope apple work on performance instead of adding features...