View

You’ve ripped and bought music and videos, and you’ve tagged your files. Now you need to choose the right way to view your burgeoning media library so you can find what you want to listen to easily.

In this chapter, I’ll show you various ways to arrange iTunes to display your media files, which is the first step to getting access to your ever-growing media library.

View Topics

How Do I Use the Sidebar?

What Are Those Buttons in the Middle of the Navigation Bar?

How Can I View My Music Library?

How Do I Use Podcast Library Views?

How Do I Show Columns in List Views?

What Can I Do with Contextual Menus?

How Do I Use the Sidebar?

The iTunes sidebar, which displays at the left of the app’s window, helps you navigate within your various media libraries. If you don’t see the sidebar at the left of your iTunes window, click the Library button in the center of the navigation bar. If the sidebar is still not visible, choose View > Show Sidebar.

The sidebar lets you view your media libraries in different ways. For example, in Figure 57, I’ve selected the Music library, and the sidebar lets me view my Artists, Albums, Songs, Genres, and more.

Switching to a Different Library

Above the sidebar is the Media Picker. This menu lets you choose which media library you view. If you want to view your Music library, choose Music; if you want to view podcasts, choose Podcasts. You can also choose a shared library from this menu (see How Do I Share My iTunes Library over a Network?).

You can eschew the Media Picker entirely and switch libraries from the keyboard. If you press Command-1, iTunes displays your Music library. Command-2 shows the Movies library. Command-3 displays the TV Shows library. You can see all these keyboard shortcuts in the View > Media Kind submenu.

Customizing the Media Picker

You can edit the Media Picker menu to slim it down or to expand its offerings. Open the Media Picker and choose Edit Menu. Select or deselect items you want to see in the Media Picker (Figure 58). When you’re finished, click Done to save your changes.

Viewing Media from the Sidebar

At the top of the sidebar, you can choose how you view your media. In Figure 59, you can see the default options for the Music library.

Click a view in the sidebar—Artists, Albums, etc.—to see your Music library in the main pane of the window with a focus on that element. (I explain these views below, in How Can I View My Music Library?.)

Below the Library section, you’ll see several entries:

• iOS devices: If you connect an iOS device to your computer, or if you use Wi-Fi syncing for your iOS device, you’ll see it under Devices, just below the Library section. Clicking the device’s icon displays the content of the device. (To alter sync settings in order to change what’s on the device, click the Devices button on the navigation bar, to the right of the Media Picker menu, as described in About the Devices Button.)
• Apple Music playlists: If you subscribe to Apple Music and save playlists to your iCloud Music Library, you’ll see those playlists next in the sidebar.
• Local playlists: The final section of the sidebar contains local playlists. For the Music library, you’ll see Music Playlists. If you’re viewing your Movies library, the label will read Movie Playlists, and so on. If you click that section header, you can choose to view just the playlists from that kind of media or to view all your playlists.

Editing the Sidebar

The Library section of the sidebar lists several views by default. You can edit it to show only those views that you prefer to use. (I explain the different views later in this chapter.) Hover your pointer over the Library header at the top of the sidebar and then click Edit. Select or deselect the checkboxes for the various views (Figure 60). Click Done when you finish.

You’ll have to edit the Library section for each media library; the views are not the same across libraries.

Hiding the Sidebar

You may not wish to use the sidebar. It may distract you, or you may have a small display and prefer to expand the content section of the iTunes window as much as possible. If you wish to hide the sidebar, choose View > Hide Sidebar. When you do this, you’ll still be able to access the contents of the sidebar, using a new navigation tool that Apple added to iTunes 12.5.

If the sidebar is hidden, the Library button in the navigation bar picks up a down-pointing caret , to show that you can click it to dis­play a menu. I’ve cut off the popover in Figure 60, but you can see that it lists the views that you would otherwise access from the sidebar. Below that, it lists any connected devices and then your playlists. Choose any item to view it.

What Are Those Buttons in the Middle of the Navigation Bar?

The first button in the middle of the navigation bar, Library, cor­­­responds to your personal iTunes library. Other buttons on the navigation bar give you access to other ways of viewing a library’s content, or to content beyond your library.

When you’ve chosen Music in the Media Picker, for example, the center of the navigation bar gives you several music-related options (Figure 62).

Here’s what each music-related button does:

• Library: Click this button to see the your library for the type of media that you are viewing.
• For You: This view, which appears only if Apple Music is on, recommends music you might want to stream from Apple Music, based on your iTunes library, your iTunes Store purchases, and songs that you’ve loved.
• Browse: This view shows music available in Apple Music (if Apple Music is on). It highlights new music, but you can search for any Apple Music content from this view.
• Radio: You can listen to Apple Music Radio stations, including Beats 1, by clicking this button. Even if you don’t have an Apple Music subscription, you still can listen to Beats 1, plus you may see other stations that you can play.
• Store: Click this button to shop for music in the iTunes Store. (Each library offers access to the iTunes Store, with the exception of Tones and Internet Radio.)

As another example, when Movies or TV Shows is chosen in the Media Picker, the buttons at the center of the navigation bar are a bit different (Figure 63). Also, you might think that an option like Unwatched should be in the sidebar, but it’s not.

Other kinds of media display buttons related to their type of content.

How Can I View My Music Library?

As I explained earlier in this chapter, to see a media library, choose it in the Media Picker and then click the Library button in the navigation bar. If you choose Music and click Library, you can select a music-related view in the sidebar under the Library heading. These include Recently Added, Artists, Albums, Songs, Genres, and Videos.

If you edit the Library section of the sidebar, as I explained in Editing the Sidebar, above, you can add Composers and Compilations views, and remove views you don’t want to use.

I now discuss the various views, focusing mainly on the Music library, but mentioning equivalent views in other libraries. I discuss podcasts separately, in How Do I Use Podcast Library Views?, because they are different.

Recently Added View

Recently Added view is available in the Music, Movies, and TV Shows libraries. Bold headings, such as Today and This Month, organize the view by time, so you can scroll down to see your history of adding music, going much further back than “recent.”

For Music, Recently Added displays music by album (Figure 64); for Movies and TV Shows, Recently Added displays content in a grid; one item per movie or per TV season. You cannot change this display; you cannot even change the size of the artwork.

I like to check my Recently Added views periodically for these reasons:

• Listening to new music: No matter how you add music—ripping CDs, buying music from the iTunes Store, or adding it from Apple Music—Recently Added will remind you of what’s been added. To hear your recent songs in order from this view, click the Play button on the toolbar.
• Noticing the delivery of a pre-ordered movie: If you’ve set iTunes to automatically download new content, your movie will appear in this view.
• Keeping up with a season pass to a TV series: If you’ve set iTunes to automatically download new content, you can check Recently Added to find new shows quickly.

Artists View

Artists view adds an artists column to the right of the sidebar and displays a slightly expanded album view.

If you click an artist’s name, you see albums from that artist in the right-hand pane (Figure 65). The header bar of that pane displays the number of albums and songs in your library by that artist.

Artists view is the saddest view in iTunes. To start with, when iTunes 12.5 was released, and at the time of this writing, most artists don’t have photos in the artists column; the rest show microphones that look like they’re waiting for Bono to sing about nameless streets or beautiful days. Second, the right-hand side of the view—the part that displays albums and tracks—is sterile. Album artwork used to be much larger. This new view gives more room to read track names, but relegates the artwork to a small thumbnail.

You can customize Artists view from the View Options window, accessed by choosing View > Show View Options (Command-J):

• Sort albums: Choose an option from the pop-up menu to sort the listings in the right-hand pane by title, genre, year, or rating.
• Show compilations: To see all your compilations in the right-hand pane, select the Group Compilations checkbox and then select Compilations from near the top of the artists list.

Albums View

The default Albums view displays album art in a grid, with album and artist names below each image. You can’t change the size of the album art, which means that many album titles are truncated at around 25 characters. You can see this in Figure 66, where some albums don’t show complete titles.

When you click an album, the expanded album view opens. This view shows the album and artist much more clearly, with the album art at the left (Figure 67).

To tell iTunes how to sort albums in Albums view, from The View Options Window (Command-J), choose either Grid or List:

• Grid: In Grid view, iTunes displays albums in order set by two criteria. With the defaults (Sort By: Artist and then: Title), iTunes first sorts your albums by artist, and then, within each artist, by title. The options available are Title, Artist, Genre, Year, and Rating. (Genre is available only as the first sort criterion.) So you can sort by Year and Artist, or Genre and Title, or any combination of those five criteria.
• List: In List view, you can choose to sort albums by Title, Genre, Year, or Rating. (If your View Options window goes blank after you choose List, unfortunately, you can’t choose these options! Choose View > View As > Grid to switch back to Grid view. I hope that Apple fixes this bug soon.)

Composers View

Composers view displays music that has a Composer tag filled in for it. Composers view looks much like Artists view (described above), though it doesn’t display any photos in the left-hand column next to the names of the composers. If you open The View Options Window (Command-J), you can sort albums in the right-hand pane by Title, Artist, Genre, Year, or Rating.

Genres View

Genres view is similar to Artists view (discussed above), though, like Composers view, there are no graphics to illustrate the genre names. Click a genre to see all its albums to the right (Figure 68).

You can sort by Title, Artist, Year, or Rating in The View Options Window (Command-J), but you can’t sort by two criteria, as you can in Albums view.

Songs View

Songs view is a spartan list of songs, with user-configurable columns showing tags and other metadata (Figure 69).

In Songs view, to open the Column Browser, choose View > Column Browser > Show Column Browser (Command-B) (Figure 70).

Using the Column Browser is an easy way to play entire albums. You successively constrict your selection from genre to artist to album, and as you do this, the list of tracks displayed below the Column Browser shortens until you’re left with only the album you want. Then click the Play button or double-click its first track to listen.

The Column Browser is also a good way to navigate your library when you’re deciding what to put in playlists, or what to sync to an iOS device.

Songs view also lets you display columns for each kind of metadata about your music; see How Do I Show Columns in List Views?, shortly ahead, for more about controlling which columns appear.

Playlist View

Playlist view is available from The View Options Window when you select a playlist.

A hybrid between Albums view and Songs view, Playlist view displays more information than Songs view, without taking up as much space as Albums view (Figure 71). Each track gets a compact entry, showing the track name, artist, and album, along with the duration, rating stars (for an unrated song, the stars appear when you hover over the track), a Love button to the left of a track’s entry (for an unloved song, you need to hover over the track to see it), a Download icon (if the track is in the cloud), and the year (if a year tag is entered). For classical music, the composer’s name and work name also appear.

Playlist view is particularly interesting for playlists you save from Apple Music because a description appears above the list, giving you more information about the artists or songs in it. In addition, tracks in Apple Music playlists contain Plus buttons so you can add them to your library, if you wish (shown in Figure 71, above).

Playlist view offers fewer display options than the other views: since it includes artwork thumbnails, you can’t choose whether to display artwork or not; you also can’t choose which columns you see. You can choose only a sort order from the View Options window.

When you view playlists—whether in Playlist view, or another view—iTunes displays a montage of the playlist’s album artwork in the play­list header. You can change this artwork if you wish, so long as the playlist isn’t from Apple Music. Just drag a graphic from the Finder, or from a Web page, to the location where the artwork is in the playlist header, or click the artwork to open a popover, where you can click Other to select a file on your Mac.

I find Playlist view to be a good, compact, information-rich view for playlists that contain disparate songs. If you create playlists for albums, however, you might prefer Songs view with album artwork shown, since you need to see the artwork only once for each album.

Viewing Music Videos

iTunes provides access to music videos through the Videos entry in the sidebar, when Music is chosen in the Media Picker. These are files whose Media Kind is set to Music Video in the Options pane of the Info dialog (see How Do I Put Files in the Correct Library?). As with movies, you can view them in List or Grid view, and you can sort them using The View Options Window by two levels of criteria, such as Genre: Artist or Artist: Title.

Note that you can still see your music videos in your Music library, grouped by artist, but they’re mixed in with your albums and songs.

How Do I Show Columns in List Views?

For list-style views, such as Classic List view for podcasts and Songs view for music, you can choose which columns iTunes displays. Each column corresponds to a Tag.

You can show or hide a column by Control-clicking any column header and choosing a column name; a visible column has a checkmark next to its name in the contextual menu. Because you have to individually choose to show or hide each column by selecting its name, you may find it easier to work with the View Options window.

Open the View Options window by pressing Command-J. The lower section of the window lets you show or hide columns (Figure 72); you see different options depending on which view is active in iTunes.

After adding columns, you may want to reposition them by dragging them left or right in the column header area, and resize them to show all the information they contain or to make them fit in the window.

One way to resize columns is to Control-click a column header, then choose Auto Size Column or Auto Size All Columns. iTunes fits the size of one or all visible columns to hold the longest text that they contain. Or, drag the divider between any two column headers.

What Can I Do with Contextual Menus?

Quite a few iTunes commands are available in contextual menus. These menus are worth paying attention to, since it’s often faster to open a contextual menu than to work with a menu bar menu, especially since a contextual menu can appear in the MiniPlayer or in full-screen mode. I often use a contextual menu to rate songs or to add selected songs to the Up Next queue.

A contextual menu appears when you Control-click (right-click) the appropriate location. If you have a trackpad, you may prefer a different method, such as a two-finger tap.

For example, if you Control-click the iTunes LCD exactly on a track name while playing a tune, a contextual menu opens (Figure 73). When you Control-click that same tune in your iTunes library, the contextual menu has a few additional items.

Contextual menus also open when you Control-click other items: playlists, artists, genres, movies, podcasts, etc. Each menu has options appropriate to the selected item.

The options available from contextual menus are also accessible from the menu bar, in the Song menu (for music) or in appropriately named menus for other types of media (pick a different type of media in the Media Picker and the menu on the menu bar changes its name).