October 25, 2010

Customizing Your Album Artwork In iTunes

When you're online and you use Get Album Artwork in the Advanced menu, iTunes fetches any album cover art you're missing for albums currently available in the iTunes Store, regardless of where you got them. And you can have it do that automatically when you add music to your library by checking "Automatically download missing album artwork" under the Store tab in the iTunes Preferences panel. You can also customize the art iTunes will display by adding your own artwork choices via the Info Panel.

Select a song in an album, choose Get Info from the File menu, then click the Artwork tab. You can drag images directly into the artwork well, or click Add to look for eligible images on your computer. If you add multiple images to the well you can then drag them around within it. When you view your library using any view other than List, iTunes will display the leftmost image in the well (topmost, leftmost if you've dragged in several images). This lets you use alternate images for special situations -- displaying photos of friends who particularly like the albums playing, for instance -- then switch back to the standard album art with a simple drag. To show off your custom work, choose Cover Flow and use the Full Screen switch on the lower right to toggle a full-screen display of the art for the album being played.

October 11, 2010

Use iTunes 10 Home Sharing With the New Apple TV

The Home Sharing feature in the iTunes 10 Advanced menu lets you easily share your iTunes media libraries among up to five computers in your household and, along with the new Apple TV, spread around the locations where you can view the movies and TV shows they contain. Turn on Home Sharing on each computer, using the same Apple ID for each one. You can then easily copy library contents from one computer to another (just drag and drop in your iTunes source column) so each person can have what they want on the computer they use when they sync their iPhone, iPad, and iPod touch. And everyone on the home network can immediately stream the contents from any of the libraries in the computers that are turned on in order to watch and listen. Also, you can extend this ability to your big screen via the new Apple TV. Just turn on Home Sharing in the Apple TV's Settings menu and enter the same iTunes Account information you used for Home Sharing on the computers. You can then stream the contents of any of the available libraries when you want to watch on that screen.