12 Advanced Tricks for Mastering iTunes

There was a time when iTunes was a simple little program for managing music and copying it over to iPod MP3 players. That was it, and it was good.

Apple bought SoundJam MP software in 2000 and renamed it with an "I"—and it wasn't even the first product out of Cupertino to get that naming treatment (that designation goes to the iMac). In the 14 years since, iTunes has grown and grown, taking on management of much more than just music. It now handles video and apps for iPhones and iPads and the modern iPod touch as well. It's also become the front end store for buying media and apps. The iTunes store is now the world's biggest vendor of music, selling billions of songs and taking command of 64 percent of the online music market. And it's served up more than 60 billion applications as of October 2013. It even has over a billion subscribers to podcasts using the software to download and listen in. (The one place it's not on top is books. Yet.)

iTunes, currently at version 11.2 and still one of our Editors' Choice software picks, is more powerful (and some might say bloated) than ever. And that makes it a pretty complicated piece of software, whether you run it on your Windows or Mac OS computer. Whatever you're into, be it music, video, apps, podcasts, the program has something you want, but maybe haven't figure out yet.

Below are our top 12 tricks that put the power back in your hands. If you've got more great tricks, share them in the comments below.

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Sidebar or No Sidebar

The older versions of iTunes had a sidebar for navigation, where you could see all your playlists, devices, shared locations, jump to the store, and more. Version 11 did away with that to provide a button showing media types. It cleans up the interface—but if you really miss the sidebar, get it back by going into the View menu and selecting "Show Sidebar." Going back to select "Hide Sidebar" gets rid of it.

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Create iPhone Ringtones

Apple wants to sell ringtones, so it doesn't make this process easy. But it's worth it, since you can make a tone based on any song you already own.

Right click song, go to Get Info, and select the Options tab. Check off the start time and stop time—it has to be under 30 seconds. Click OK. Then right click again and select "Create AAC Version." (If you don't see that selection, you'll probably see "Create MP3 version." To fix that, go to Preference, General tab, and select Import Settings. At the top, change the Import Using drop down to say "AAC Encoder." Click OK then go back to the file and right click to get "Create AAC Version.")

You'll now see the file listed twice in iTunes. Right click the new one and select "Show in Windows Explorer" (for Windows) or "Show in Finder" (for MacOS). The new file should end in .M4A extension. Change the file name so it ends in .M4R. (R as in ringtone!).

Go back to iTunes. Right click on the file you created and delete it (not just from iTunes, but also send it to the trash or recycle bin.) Drag the .M4R file you renamed from Explorer/Finder to iTunes. Click on Ringtones to the left and you should see it there. Next time you sync your iPhone, it should be available. Find your contact in the iPhone and assign them the ringtone—or a text-message tone. (Mac users could also just use GarageBand to make it, then select "Send Ringtone to iTunes.)

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Redeem iTunes Gift Cards via Camera

Typing in all the numbers on the back of an iTunes gift card is a pain. The iTunes software for Mac (not Windows) takes away the agony by entering the numbers for you. When in the iTunes Store, there's a link to the right side under "Quick Links" that says Redeem. Click "Use Camera" and you can use your built-in Webcam to scan the numbers and enter them without typing. (You can also do this on the iTunes Store app on iOS devices.)

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(De)Authorizing PCs

Ah, DRM, you truly suck. But because not all of us could buy our entire music collection when Napster was still a thing at the turn of the century, it's likely you bought some music from iTunes that has Digital Rights Management attached. If so, you're punished when you try to play it on a new computer that isn't "authorized" by you and iTunes. You can only do it on 5 computers at a time. And woe be it if you forget to deauthorize one that has died or is no longer yours, for then you eventually must deauthorize ALL authorized PCs when it's time to add a new one.

To do so, you open the iTunes Store, sign in, click your email address to access your account page, and then click the "Deauthorize All" button. Don't worry, it doesn't delete any music or purchase. You'll simply have to go back in and re-authorize the computers that still use iTunes. Do that from the View menu.

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Parenting via iTunes

There's no substitute for actually looking at what a kid is playing on their iDevice of choice, but you can get a head start with the Parental Controls that are built into iTunes. With it, you can disable things like podcasts and Internet radio and even purchases from the iTunes Store. The downside: you'll be blocking your access, not just the kids.

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Share and Share Alike

Go to the File menu and select Turn on Home Sharing. You'll need to enter your iTunes Store ID and password. Do the same on other computers (up to 5) in your home with iTunes and you'll soon be able see all the music and video you own on all the computers. This is a perfect way to copy music between two or more installs of iTunes, even if one is on a Mac and the other is on a Windows PC. Visit the Preferences in iTunes to select exactly what you want to share.

You can also access those home shared iTunes accounts on an iOS device. Go into the device Settings, select Music, scroll down to Home Sharing, and enter the same ID and password. When you next enter the Music app, go to the More button, and if you're on the same home network and iTunes is running on the local PCs, you should get a Shared option in the list. This is a great way to access hundreds of Gigabytes of media on an iDevice that might only have 8 or 16GB of space available, most of which is probably filled with apps.

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Match Your Music

Rather than utilize your home network, you can use iTunes Match to take advantage of the cloud. It might be the best thing to happen to iTunes users who are running out of storage space. For $24.99 a year, you can make sure that the music you have stored in iTunes gets "backed up" –that's in quotes to indicate it's not quite a true backup, but better: Apple matches your file to existing music files, which you can then access on other PCs or devices running iTunes or the Apple Music app. If Apple can'tfind a match in the iTunes store, it will upload the file, which you can download elsewhere.

There are caveats. Your music files have to be of 96 Kbps quality or higher for Match to notice them. That means if you have MP3s ripped or downloaded at lower quality, they won't get matched or backed up to iCloud for play across all your iDevices. The fix: select all those files that don't get an iCloud icon, right click them, and convert them to AAC files at a higher bit rate. The limits: Songs can't be over 200MB each. You can only store up to 25,000 songs. (In comparison, Amazon's similar MP3 storage goes to 250,000 songs at the same price of $24.99 a year!)

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Take Care of Big Collections

What about those of us with over 25,000 songs who still want to keep things in iTunes? Backup is key—and may require a RAID-based network attached storage device, on top of that already strained hard drive of yours. It's worse if you're such the audiophile that you keep everything in the highest possible bit-rate so that your lossless digital files are indistinguishable from CDs. Even the biggest old-school iPod can only hold 160GB of media. What's a music aficionado to do?

One quick option now available in iTunes 11: copy files at a lower bit rate to your mobile device. That means those hundreds of Gigs that won't fit on an 16GB iPhone can, at least, be partially copied over at a manageable size. It's best to create playlists and when syncing with the phone, use them to make the copy and conversion.

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Fill In Album Art

If you've got albums on iTunes still showing a blank grey box for the album artwork, chances are iTunes can find the image for you. It's not going to work on your more obscure tracks, but more often than not, most popular tunes will be there. Just click or right click an album and choose Get Album Artwork. Within a few seconds, you should see the CD cover wherever iTunes can display it.

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iTunes Radio Shortcuts

iTunes Radio takes on the likes of Pandora and Spotify by allowing you to create streaming "radio stations" based on your favorite artists. Add more artists to the station, you get more musical diversity, and it just plays. You can even "tune" the station to play just the big hits, or get more variety to discover new tracks by similar artists. And if you pay for iTunes Match, you can get iTunes Radio without ads. You don't get much control beyond that. Yet.

If you want to create a desktop shortcut to an iTunes Radio station that will open directly in iTunes, go to the station, click the Share button (an arrow in a box) and select "Copy Link." Go to the desktop in Windows, right click to Create Shortcut, and paste in the link. Change the  to and then add  to the end.

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Get Mini With It

Hit Cntrl-Shift-1 in iTunes and you'll get the new iteration of the iTunes mini player, a floating desktop player that is much improved over the past versions. It includes a thumbnail of album art, track progress bar, volume, search, and the Up Next menu so you can see what tracks are playing soon, and control over AirPlay devices.

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Rate with Half Stars

You can rate any track in iTunes from one to five stars. We're big fans of that level of ratings here at PCMag. If there's music you actually don't like, but you're an album completeist and don't want to delete them, rate the hated melody with a single star. You can then tell your smart playlists to actively ignore those tracks—especially as you sync music to your space-restrained iDevice of choice. But if you find only 5 to be limiting and want to go the extra step—10 levels—then you need half-stars. On the Mac this is pretty easy to turn on. Quit iTunes, open the Terminal, and type in this line:

defaults write com.apple.iTunes allow-half-stars -bool true

Windows users, it's a little more complicated. You can find complete instructions here..