Top Ten iPod Tips and Tricks
- Tip #1: Add or Change Album Art
- Tip #2: Find and Delete Duplicate Tracks
- Tip #3: Create Smart Playlists
- Tip #4: Find Out What Playlists Contain a Certain Song
- Tip #5: Use Your iPod to Give Presentations
- Tip #6: Work Around Copyright Restrictions
- Tip #7: Create Multiple iTunes Libraries
- Tip #8: Back Up Your iTunes Library
- Tip #9: Use Your iPod to Store Computer Files
- Tip #10: Move Music from Your iPod Back to Your PC
There are a lot of useful functions on your iPod and in the iTunes software that most users just don't know about. Move beyond the main menus and much coolness awaits—as evidenced in these ten iPod tips and tricks. They're easy enough that any user can do them!
Tip #1: Add or Change Album Art
When you purchase a track from the iTunes Store, it automatically comes with the correct cover art for that track's album. And when you rip a track from a CD, iTunes accesses the iTunes Store to get the cover art for that track, too.
But sometimes iTunes doesn't get it right. Maybe it doesn't know which track you're ripping. Maybe the iTunes Store doesn't have cover art for that particular album. Or maybe iTunes doesn't guess right and downloads the wrong cover art for that particular track.
Whatever the reason, you're likely to end up with more than a few tracks in your iTunes library that don't have the right cover art. It also means that when you play that track on your iPod, the cover art will be wrong or missing.
Fortunately, there are a few different ways to add or change the cover art for tracks in your iTunes library. Perhaps the easiest method is to display the Artwork pane in the iTunes software, by selecting View > Show Artwork. All you have to do is select the track with the missing cover art, find the cover art on another website, and then use your mouse to drag and drop the artwork from that website into the artwork pane. The iTunes software then adds that artwork to the selected track.
If you have more than one track or an entire album with missing art, there's another method you can use. Select the tracks in the iTunes library; then select File > Get Info. When the Get Info dialog box appears, select the Artwork tab. You can use the drag-and-drop method to copy artwork from another website, or click the Add button to browse your hard disk for the replacement art file.
All of which begs the related question, where do you find album cover artwork? The best place to search is Amazon.com, which has artwork for the millions of CDs it sells online. Next best is to do a Google Image search; Google does a good job of finding just about anything. When you locate the artwork, save it to your hard disk, or copy and paste it into iTunes.