iTunes as an application has long gone beyond what its name dictates. Apart from your ‘tunes’, it now manages Movies, TV shows, Applications, Podcasts, Ringtones, iPhones, Games, and is the gateway for your iDevices to access even non-media content like Contacts and Calendars.

Without getting carried away with my ranting, here are a bunch of random tips that should help you navigate better through this ever-growing application. None of these involve any hackery and work with the default settings in iTunes.

1. Quickly jump to your any artist by rapidly typing the name. Even the first few characters will do. One doesn’t have to have anything selected for this to work. And this will come in handy if you use CoverFlow in fullscreen mode (yeah, like anyone does).
2. Command+F, as we know it, symbolises search. However, in iTunes it is used to go into full screen mode. Moreover, there is no “Search” in the menu bar so that one could change the shortcut. So one has to stick to the default one, Command+Option+F, which isn’t half bad.
3. Another shortcut that I like is the 5 second forward/backward skip for the currently playing track. Works with any playlist or track selected. Command+Option+left/right arrow keys. Of course, to skip to the next song/previous song, that would be Command+arrow keys. I have a feeling Steve Jobs knew this one.
4. iTunes lacks a “Now Playing” playlist. Which means that, for one, you cannot queue up tracks after you have started playing a song. Two, one cannot make iTunes automatically stop playback after playing a single song in the library. The first one I still don’t know what to do with, but for the second one, just type in any random characters in the search field to make the library blank. This will cause iTunes to stop playing after the currently playing track is over.
5. As inconsistent as the Zoom button is in the rest of the OS, here we have a totally different behaviour. iTunes goes into mini mode on clicking the green Zoom button. To make it conform to normal OS X zoom behaviour, one has to Option+Click the zoom button.
6. Cover Flow is a great addition to iTunes and I usually have it turned on all the time. However, if one has a lot of applications and documents open, resizing the iTunes window with Coverflow on can be a big pain as it continuously redraws the artwork. In situations like this, Command+drag the window corner which will just drag out the outline. On release, iTunes will resize itself to the new dimensions without putting much strain on resources.
7. By default, iTunes grabs any thumbnail from within the first few seconds of a video. Now you might want to grab the movie cover from somewhere like impawards.com, but if you are too lazy to do that, then just Ctrl+click the movie while it is playing/paused, and select “Set Poster Frame”. Next time you see it in Front Row or iTunes or your iPhone, the poster frame will be something more meaningful (as opposed to the black screen or studio name that iTunes automatically generates).
8. With Cover Flow, artwork has become an all important part of managing music. However, going through every album with missing artwork one at a time can be time consuming and ratty. To get iTunes to search for artwork for all those albums with missing artwork at once, just make sure you having nothing selected (just reopen iTunes) in your library, and select “Get Album Artwork” from the Advanced menu in the menu bar.
9. Audiobooks are great. If you haven’t tried them yet, don’t wait any longer, especially if you have an iPod/iPhone. However, dragging MP3s or AACs into iTunes, specially if each of those files is a separate chapter is not going to cut it. It will clutter your library and not resume from where you left off. To get the audiobooks into the special Audiobooks section in your library, convert the files to AAC, if they aren’t already, and then rename the files to the .m4b extension. When you import those files into iTunes, they will automatically go into the Audiobooks section. Alternatively, one could use Audialhub to automatically convert and send to files to iTunes as audiobooks.
10. I don’t really have a 10th tip, and 9 didn’t sound like a wholesome figure, so for the last one I will suggest you look at our iTunes Extenders post to get a better iTunes experience. Also look at the MetaX review, which lets you quickly tag your movies and TV shows.

If you have any questions regarding iTunes, or any special tips to share, please leave them in the comments.

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