Tech Tips: 15 Ways to Make iTunes Rock

Posted 12/14/2010 at 11:56am | by David Murphy

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It’s hard to imagine that one could really tweak or improve iTunes in any particular fashion. I say that not because the software is perfect, rather, because it’s completely closed-source. Apple doesn’t have a list of extensions that you can just install into the application at a whim. If anything, iTunes is built for two purposes and two purposes alone: Buying stuff from Apple’s Store and transferring said stuff over to an Apple device of your choosing.

Voila?

Yet, the more I looked into ways that one can extend the iTunes experience, the more I found that yes, Virginia, there are plenty of different tools, add-ons, and techniques you can employ to really make this music application shine. And before you start in the comments, yes, I know that there are better music players than iTunes. However, that’s not to say that iTunes itself is a poor program—with a little tender love and care, you can make it as welcome in your home as any other program you enjoy. Trust me.

Let’s get started!

Installing iTunes Sans Bloatware

The best place to start our journey toward iTunes awesomeness is, of course, at the point of installation. If you’ve ever used the application before, you’ll know that Apple—unfortunately—dumps a ton of crap on your system during the course of the iTunes install. This includes calls to startup programs that unnecessarily run behind-the-scenes on your system, a network service you likely don’t even need, browser plugins, et cetera.

Ed Bott over at ZDNet has written a fine how-to for getting past all the annoying junk and installing, quite simply, iTunes. Follow his advice for a bloat-free music application!

Punish Ping

For whatever reason, you might not want to jump on-board with Apple’s Ping service. Perhaps your musical tastes are so esoteric that you want to keep your perfectly formatted library all to yourself—no sharing with friends and strangers anything you happen to rock out to and/or enjoy. That’s fine. Apple isn’t twisting your arm to sign up for Ping.

Now, suppose you want to remove all the Ping options from your right-click context menu as well. There used to be a fancy little way to do it via a command prompt window. However, that’s since been replaced by an easier method: Click Edit, select Preferences, find the Parental Control tab, and check the box next to Ping.

Double Library Trouble

You ninja you; I would understand your desire to keep your less desirable music (say, the entire Spice Girls collection) out of the easily accessibility of iTunes’ shuffle feature. But there are many more reasons than that for why you might want to build separate iTunes libraries.

Here’s how: Just hold the shift key before you launch iTunes. It’s as simple as that. The software will prompt you to either pick a library or create one. If you do the latter, your two libraries will exist completely independently of each other—which can be a pain if you want to, say, add some MP3s to both. Secrecy has its price!

Pretty Up Your Collection

Apple’s iTunes is pretty good about trying to match album artwork to the various songs and albums you have scattered about your library. But it’s not perfect, nor can your esoteric musical tastes (previously including such random bands as The Beatles) always be found in the iTunes store—the source for said artwork.

To better figure out what you have to import manually, make a smart playlist (File > New Smart Playlist). Once the associated window pops up, select “Has Artwork” as the rule and “is false” as the conditional. Once you click “OK,” you’ll have a self-updating list of albums that require your artistic touch!

Share Your Library

If you’re running a fairly networked house, then odds are good that you’ll want to be able to access and modify a single iTunes library from any system you can get your grubby little hands on. No sense running multiple libraries across multiple computers with multiple duplicate files, right? As well, dialing into a single iTunes repository on a single system is great for file playback, but not so great for file editing.

Our friends at Lifehacker have written up a fairly comprehensive (trust us; it’s a lot of steps) guide to maintaining a single, editable library across all of your networked systems. Take that, duplicity!

“Share” Your Library

Here’s the deal–if you do happen to be in the situation where different computers on your network have different music files on them, it’s possible to grab the exact songs you want from any other networked iTunes application using a third-party piece of software. The app’s called Aethyr, and it’s an Adobe Air-based program that lets you “rip” music, as it were, from any other iTunes you can find on your network.

We suppose this would be considered the “Holy Grail” of applications for one on a college dorm room network, but what you’re thinking about is illegal and wrong. Shame on you.

Dump Your iTunes to the Web

This one’s a little esoteric, so hear us out. The Web app “Moof” allows you to upload your library file to its servers and it, in turn, gives you the opportunity to jam to your files no matter your physical location.

Huh?

No, you don’t upload every MP3 (or whatnot) to the service. Nor do you have to pay any money to get access to the jams that Moof recognizes via your uploaded library file. Instead, this service uses the power of YouTube—specifically, videos featuring your songs found on YouTube—to give you an on-demand radio of sorts that, itself, is based on your iTunes library.

That’s a mouthful… and a clever workaround to having to carry your entire musical collection on a portable hard drive wherever you go.

For the most advanced tips of all, read on!