Digital music: Managing your music

iTunes: Free software that's ideal for managing your digital music collection

In the second part of our guide to digital music and downloads, we look at the ways to manage your digital music collection.

- Part one: A perfect storm
- Part three: Digital downloads
- Jargon Buster
- Frequently ask questions

Five years ago, Apple developed a free software package called iTunes. Its purpose was to make importing, managing and sorting your music on your computer as simple as possible. Initially, it was only available for Macintosh computers, but within a very short time Apple had created a version that would work on Microsoft Windows computers as well.

iTunes has leapt ahead of other music management software packages because of its simplicity of use. It uses plain language and familiar icons if you use a stereo - play, stop, rewind, etc - and makes it easy to organise your music in whatever way you choose.

Available as a free download from the Apple website, iTunes is compatible with all the major computer operating systems, and is installed at the click of a button. iTunes offers not only the means to organise your music, whether from your CDs or downloaded, but also a selection of more than 900 radio stations from across the internet. Better still, if you watch films or TV shows on your computer, iTunes can be a library for those too.

Importing music from your CDs

Importing music from CD is as easy as inserting the CD into your computer's CD drive. iTunes will then ask if you want to copy the music into your library. If the computer is connected to the internet, it will also look up the titles of the songs on that album and even get a copy of the CD’s artwork, so that when you play music from that album, the artwork is displayed. If your computer is not internet-connected, the next time it is, you can get iTunes to look up the titles and the artwork for the music you imported while disconnected.

Once your music has been imported into iTunes, it is available in a library that can be ordered by song name, artist name, album title, rating, genre and a number of other options. Within iTunes, it is possible to look at your music library in three ways - firstly as a text list broken down by genre, artist and album. A second view displays your music by album, with a small version of the album’s artwork and all the songs organised in a list by album. Lastly, your library is displayed so that the album art is the biggest feature and you can virtually flick through your music by album cover and double-click on the album you want to listen to. This is called Coverflow and looks great on your screen as well as being a fun way to browse.

Creating playlists

You can create any number of playlists from your library, so you might create a playlist of all the female singers in your collection, or all the music from one artist, or all the music from one particular genre, such as pop. These playlists can be built manually by clicking on and dragging the title of a song into the playlist you’ve created, or iTunes can create smart playlists automatically for you. These are built by selecting the criteria in advance - for example any song you rate at three out of five stars or higher. So any time you rate a song in that way, iTunes will add it to that playlist.

Rating songs is done through iTunes and you can rate every song in your library on a scale between no stars and five stars. There are as many possible playlists as you want, and as iTunes doesn’t copy the song itself they take up a small amount of space on your computer.

You can share your playlists as well. You can email the list of songs to your friends, but better still you can publish them on the iTunes store at a click of a button. Your playlist will then be available for anyone to view, pick songs from, buy those songs or even buy the complete playlist. These published playlists are called iMixes, and there are thousands of them already on the iTunes store, including a number of celebrity playlists.

Taking your music on the move

If you have an iPod, Apple’s very popular digital audio player, then iTunes will automatically synchronise the music and the playlists from your computer on to your iPod - you simply need to plug it in. The artwork is copied across as well, so that when you listen to music on your iPod the artwork is displayed on the small screen at the same time.

There are many more features in iTunes - it’s possible to manipulate your digital music library in thousands of different ways, or you can simply import your music and play it. The choice and control is entirely in your hands.

Check out part three of our guide to digital music to find out about digital downloads.

- Download the iTunes software from Apple for free