You can find a particular song, artist, album, genre, or composer in several ways.

With the iPod app open, the easiest way to find music is to type a song, artist, album, or composer name into the Search field in the upper-right corner of the screen.

If you'd rather browse your music library, tap the appropriate tab at the bottom of the screen — Songs, Artists, Albums, Genres, or Composers — and the items of that type appear.

Now you can find a song, artist, album, genre, or composer by

Then, when you find what you're looking for, here's what happens based on which tab is selected:

Figure 8-2. I tapped "Bleu" in the list of artists, and this is what I saw.

Figure 8-3. I tapped the Todd Rundgren Anthology album cover, and this is what I saw.

What's the difference between artists and composers?

If you're wondering about the difference between an artist and a composer, imagine this if you will: You have a recording in your iTunes Library of a track entitled Symphony No. 5 in C Minor. The composer will always be Ludwig van Beethoven while the artist could be the London Symphony Orchestra, the Los Angeles Philharmonic, the Austin Klezmer Ensemble, or many other performers. Here's another example: The ballad Yesterday was composed by John Lennon and Paul McCartney but has been performed by artists that include the Beatles, Ray Charles, Boyz II Men, Dave Grusin, Marianne Faithful, and many others.

Now you may be wondering where your iPad gets this kind of info 'cause you know you didn't supply it. Check this out: Click on a track in iTunes on your computer, choose File

That's just some of the information that can be "embedded" in an audio track. This embedded information, sometimes referred to as the track's "tags," is what your iPad is using to distinguish between artists and composers. If a track doesn't have a composer tag, you won't find it in the Composers tab on your iPad.

One last thing: You won't see any tabs at the bottom of the screen if you select Podcasts, Audiobooks, or iTunes U in the sidebar. These libraries work pretty much the same as we've just described except instead of songs, artists, albums, genres, or composers, you see podcasts, audiobooks, and iTunes U courses.

First things first: We look at the controls you'll use after you tap a song, podcast, audiobook, or iTunes U course. We refer to these things — songs, podcasts, audiobooks, and iTunes U courses — as tracks to avoid confusion (and unnecessary typing).

But wait, there's more. You see additional controls after you tap the album art in the Now Playing area near the lower-left corner of the screen. Now, tap anywhere on the artwork that fills the screen and several additional controls appear, as shown in Figure 8-5.

Earlier in this section, we explain how to use the Volume control, Rewind/Previous Track button, Play/Pause button, Fast Forward/Next Track button, and Scrubber bar/Playhead. They may look slightly different on this screen, but they work in exactly the same way.

The new controls you see are as follows:

When what's playing is a podcast or audiobook, you see a somewhat different set of controls when you tap the cover art in the Now Playing area. (If you don't see the controls, tap the cover art to make them reappear.)

We explain the basic controls in the preceding section. The controls that are unique to podcasts and audiobooks, shown in Figure 8-7, are as follows:

Figure 8-7. These controls only appear when you listen to a podcast or audiobook.

Genius selects songs from your music library that go great together. To use it, tap the Genius button, and your iPad generates a Genius playlist of 25 songs that it picked because it thinks they go well with the song that's playing.

If you tap the Genius button on the main screen (see Figure 8-1) and no song is currently playing, an alphabetical list of songs appears, and you need to select a song before the Genius playlist can be generated.

When you create a Genius playlist, you'll find an item called Genius in your Library list; tap it and you'll see the 25 songs that Genius selected. You see three buttons in the upper-right corner of the list:

When you save a Genius playlist, it inherits the name of the song it's based upon and appears in your library with a Genius icon that looks like the Genius button. And the next time you sync your iPad, the Genius playlist magically appears in iTunes.

Playlists let you organize songs around a particular theme or mood: operatic arias, romantic ballads, British invasion — whatever. Younger folks sometimes call them mixes.

Your playlists appear in alphabetical order on the left side of the screen, below your music, podcasts, audiobooks, and iTunes U courses. If you don't see Podcasts, Audiobooks, and/or iTunes U in your library, don't worry. That merely means you don't have any podcasts, audiobooks, or iTunes U courses in your iPad's library. And don't worry if you don't have any playlists. Just know that if you had some, you'd see them here.

Although it may be easier to create playlists in iTunes on your computer, your iPad makes it relatively easy to create (and listen to) playlists:

And that's all there is to selecting, creating, and playing songs in a playlist.

Figure 8-8. This is how to create a playlist on your iPad.

The iTunes Sound Check option automatically adjusts the level of songs so that they play at the same volume relative to each other. That way, one song never blasts out your ears even if the recording level is much louder than that of the song before or after it. To tell the iPad to use these volume settings, you first have to turn on the feature in iTunes on your computer. Here's how to do that:

Now you need to tell the iPad to use the Sound Check settings from iTunes. Here's how to do that:

An equalizer increases or decreases the relative levels of specific frequencies to enhance the sound you hear. Some equalizer settings emphasize the bass (low end) notes in a song; other equalizer settings make the higher frequencies more apparent. The iPad has more than a dozen equalizer presets, with names such as Acoustic, Bass Booster, Bass Reducer, Dance, Electronic, Pop, and Rock. Each one is ostensibly tailored to a specific type of music.

The way to find out whether you prefer using equalization is to listen to music while trying out different settings. To do that, first start listening to a song you like. Then, while the song is playing, follow these steps:

If you don't like any of the presets, tap Off at the top of the EQ list to turn off the equalizer.

You can instruct your iPad to limit the loudest listening level for audio or video. To do so, here's the drill:

By the way, speaking of that lone internal iPad speaker, it is not in stereo though it sounds pretty good just the same. Of course, when you plug in headphones, you are hearing rich stereo output.