Welcome to the Novice Guide to iTunes series. iTunes is free software for your PC or Mac that allows you to buy, listen to and watch your favorite music, podcasts and even movies rate from your computer, your iPod or your iPhone. It’s a place to purchase your favorite album or movie and then lets you play your selection right from the iTunes player or you can synch your downloads to your personal device.
First, you need to download iTunes. I’m using Windows Vista on my PC. So I’m going to select that option here. Choose the operating system that you use and then check these boxes if you want to receive email notifications from iTunes and use an updates. Enter your email address here and click on Download now.
You want to save this file and give it a minute, wait downloads to your computer. And that’s all set, you want to run this setup which is what you just downloaded. Click on Next. Read through and if you agree to the terms and the license agreement, select Accept and then click Next. Choose the language you would like and the folder where you would like it stored, and then click on Install. This just takes a few minutes.
When you’re out through, select this box if you want to start iTunes and click on Finish. And now you successfully installed iTunes on your computer and you can start browsing for new tunes and movies to download.
After you’ve installed iTunes, you want to start looking for music or movies to download. Go to the iTunes store. You can look through music, movies, TV shows, music videos, audio books and more. You can also choose to browse based on genre. You can view new releases of music, movies, TV shows etcetera. If you have something in mind that you want to find, you can type it into the search box here. You can then filter your results by again movies, music, TV shows etcetera.
You can do a power search from music by entering in the title and the artist. You can do a power movie search by entering in the movie title, the actor’s name, any information you have about the movie. Then click on Search and you see the results. You can click on Result and view Preview to see if it’s what you’re looking for. There are many things to search for on the iTunes store. So browse around to see what interest you. You can always get back by clicking on the Home button.
After you found something you want to purchase on iTunes, which I covered in the second episode of this series, you’ll first one to note the price. This single by Coldplay’s only 99 cents, it’s just for one song. You can click on the arrow next to the artist’s name to the view complete albums from this person or you can click on the song to see the complete album. When you are ready to make a purchase, click on By Song.
At this point, you’ll be asked to sign in to either your Apple or your AOL account. If you don’t have one, then you can click here to create one. When you do this, you can enter your credit card information securely so you can simply purchase items in the future. I’m already a member so I’ll just log-in and click on Buy.
And now you can see here that I’m downloading that song into my iTunes account. If you want more than one person in your household to have their own iTunes account, then you can simply create a new one. Click on Continue, read the terms of service and if you agreed, check this box and click on Continue. Enter in basic account information like your email address and a password. From there, you can simply enter in your credit card information. Now, each person can pay for their own purchases.
In the first three episodes in this series, I showed you how to look for music and movies on iTunes and had a purchase on. iTunes is also a great place to download podcast that you can listen to in your computer or iPod. Click on Podcast in the iTunes store. You had your choice of audio or video podcasts. Podcast can range from topics, on arts, business, comedy, all the way down to technology or TV and film. There’s a lot of interesting stuff out there, so search for what interest you best. I’ll check out technology.
And here’s a list of feature technology podcasts. Anywhere from tips and tricks on Apple to get new shows. Click on when you like, and here you’ll see all of the available episodes. A lot of these podcasts are free, so you just need to click on get episode. And you’ll see, it will immediately start downloading. These arrows will stop rotating and disappear when it’s already to go.
You’ll also see other podcasts that people who download at this one subscribed to, which means they may interest you as well. If you want to have podcasts automatically download whenever there’s a new episode, just click on Subscribe and you won’t even have to do anything, it’ll automatically go into your iTunes account when the new episodes are available. You’ll then be able to click on podcasts and see everything you’ve downloaded. Then just click on Play to start it up. It’s that easy. You see is controllers, to pause it or go back and forth.
After you’ve downloaded some music, movies, TV shows and podcasts which I covered in the third and fourth episodes this series. You may want to create playlists, to help you organize your new media. Go to File and create new playlist. Give your playlist a name, I’ll call this Workout Music.
Now just click on your purchased music, click on and drag and drop the songs you want in this playlist on to the name of the playlist. You can do this with this many songs as you like. You can also right mouse click on a song. And then select to add it to a particular playlist. Now, you can simply go to a playlist when you want to listen to a particular group of music. If you right mouse click on a playlist, you’ll also have the option of exporting your song list, burning a CD, copying it in as order to play later or deleting it. Deleting a playlist will not delete what you’ve purchased, just the playlist.
iTunes gives you a great way to discover media you might not know about based on your taste as well as create playlists out of your music in your library that goes well together, by giving you access to what’s called iTunes Genius. Open your playlist and select a song you like. Then click on the Genius button. iTunes Genius has now created what it thinks is a playlist of songs you own that go well together. You can change how many songs appear using this menu. And hit Refresh to get a new list of songs. You can also save the playlist and you can come back to it here. If you click on the button down here, it will open up what’s called the Genius sidebar. Select another song you like. And now the Genius thinks you like this albums and singles based on what you own but you don’t own these songs. It’s a really great way to discover new tunes to listen to. You can close the sidebar any time by clicking here.
iTunes gives you a really easy way to listen to, your favorite kind of music using radio. Click on the radio link. And then choose the type of music you like. You have your choice of genre, it’s like alternative, blues, classic rock, classical college radio comedy and more. I’ll choose hits of the ‘70s, ‘80s and ‘90s. So it says here that there are 391 stations streaming. So I have a pretty big selection. When you see one you like, click on it and it will start playing and you’ll see what it’s playing here. You can skip to the next station and stop it. You’ll know what station is playing because there’ll be a volume icon next to the station name. Then you can go about your business lets name to radio that you otherwise may have never heard before.
iTunes gives you a few different ways to sort through and find your music, movies, TV shows and podcasts. When you click on music, you can choose to do your purchased music by the albums are on, the artists, genres or composers. So if you have a lot of music and you want to quickly find something, this may help. You can also choose to start playing a group of music by clicking on the Play button. Your movies can be sorted by title and by genre. And your TV shows can be sorted by name, genre and new. Your podcasts can also be sorted by name, the category they belong to and by newness. You can also resize the images and change the view here by selecting the one you like best.
Navigation around the iTunes store homepage can seem a bit overwhelming. There are few ways you can get around though without a lot of confusion. Here, you can quickly access music, movies, TV shows etcetera. You can also find the newest releases for these categories on iTunes. And these quick links will help you do things like browse the iTunes store. By category, and then you can break it down even more by genre, sub-genre, artist, etcetera.
You can also do a power search, which I covered in the second episode in this series. You can do your account, purchase gifts for someone on iTunes, redeem your own gifts from iTunes and access support and your alerts which will tell you if new music from albums you’ve recently downloaded is available.
You can also complete your albums, which means, you’ll see how many songs you need from particular albums to complete your own set. Every time you navigate to a new page, it will be displayed here. You can click on the various pages you’ve gone through to go back without having to use the Back button. That way, if I don’t want to go through different pages, I don’t have to. You can always return to the iTunes store by clicking on the Home button.
If you want to find some new music, movies or TV shows to download but don’t want to pay, then you’ll be happy to know that iTunes also has a free section. It’s a bit tricky to find unless you scroll all the way down to the bottom of the homepage.
This box displays free items on iTunes. Click on it. This shows that there are two pages of free items you can download. You can sort by feature, name or release date. Once you found something you like, click on the title to see more information. In a lot of cases with movies, it’s actually just a clip, don’t get too excited until you see the total running time. If you decide you want to download, make sure you see free first and then get movie. The free items on iTunes change, so check back to see if there’s something new that you wanted but now don’t have to pay for.
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