Introducing the iPod inside Your iPhone

To use your iPhone as an iPod, just tap the Music icon in the lower-right corner of the Home screen. At the bottom of the screen that appears, you should see five icons: Playlists, Artists, Songs, Albums, and More.

If you don’t see these icons, tap the back button in the upper-left corner of the screen (the one that looks like a little arrow pointing to the left).

Or, if you’re holding your iPhone sideways (the long edges are parallel to the ground), rotate it 90 degrees so that it’s upright (the short edges are parallel to the ground).

You’ll understand why your iPhone’s orientation matters when you read the later section “Go with the Cover (Flow).”

Playlists

Tap the Playlists icon at the bottom of the screen and a list of your playlists appears. If you have no playlists on your iPhone, don’t sweat it. Just know that if you had some, this is where they’d be. (Playlists let you organize songs around a particular theme or mood: opera arias, romantic ballads, British invasion — whatever. Younger folks sometimes call them mixes.)

Tap a playlist and you see a list of the songs it contains. If the list is longer than one screen, flick upward to scroll down. Tap a song in the list and it plays. Or tap Shuffle at the top of the list to hear a song from that playlist (and all subsequent songs) at random.

That’s all there is to selecting and playing songs from a playlist.

You find out how to create your own playlists on your iPhone a little later in this chapter.

Artistic license

Now we tell you how to find and play a song ordered by artist name rather than by playlist. Tap the Artists icon at the bottom of the screen and an alphabetical list of artists appears.

If the list is longer than one screen (which it probably is), you can, of course, flick upward to scroll down or flick downward to scroll up. But you have easier ways to find an artist.

For example, at the top of the screen, above the first artist’s name, you see a search field. Tap it and type the name of the artist you want to find. Now tap the Search button to see a list of all matching artists.

Another way to find an artist is to tap one of the little letters on the right side of the screen, to jump directly to artists whose names start with that letter. In Figure 8-1, for example, that letter is B.

Notice that a magnifying glass appears above the A on the right side of the screen. Tap the magnifying glass to jump directly to the search field.

As you can see, those letters are extremely small, so unless you have tiny fingers, you may have to settle for a letter close to the one you want or else tap several times until you select the correct one.

Our technical editor, Dennis, suggests that using a stylus instead of your finger may help.

Tap an artist’s name and one of two things occurs:

If you have songs from more than one album by an artist in your music library: A list of albums appears, as shown in Figure 8-2. Tap an album to see a list of the songs it contains. Or tap the first item in the list of albums — All Songs — to see a list of all songs on all albums by that artist.

If all songs in your music library by that artist are on the same album or aren’t associated with a specific album: A list of all songs by that artist appears.

Either way, just tap a song and it begins to play.

Song selection

Now we tell you how to find a song by its title and play it. Tap the Songs icon at the bottom of the screen and a list of songs appears.

You find songs the same ways you find artists: Flick upward or downward to scroll; use the search field at the top of the list; or tap a little letter on the right side of the screen.

If you’re not sure which song you want to listen to, try this: Tap the shuffle button at the top of the list between the search field and the first song title. Your iPhone will now play songs from your music library at random.

You can also find songs (or artists, for that matter) by typing their names in a Spotlight search, as we mention in Chapter 2.

Share and share alike

One of our favorite features is Home Sharing, which lets you use your iPhone to listen to music and watch movies, TV shows, and other media content in your computer’s iTunes library.

The gotcha is that Home Sharing is available only if your iPhone and your computer are on the same Wi-Fi network.

To make Home Sharing work for you, you have to enable it on your computer and on your iPhone. To set up Home Sharing on your computer, first launch iTunes and then Choose Advanced⇒Turn on Home Sharing. Type your Apple ID and password in the appropriate fields and click the Create Home Share button. As long as iTunes is open, your iTunes library will remain available for Home Sharing on your Wi-Fi network.

Now, to enable it on your iPhone, tap Settings⇒Music and type the same Apple ID and password you used to enable Home Sharing in iTunes. Tap the Home button when you’re finished, tap Music⇒More⇒Shared, and tap the name of your iTunes library.

Here’s the cool part: When you tap one of the icons at the bottom of the screen, rather than seeing the playlists, artists, songs, albums, and such that are stored on your iPhone, you instead see the playlists, artists, songs, albums, and so on in the iTunes library on your computer.

You’ll continue to see the shared content in the Music app as long as your iPhone remains connected to the Wi-Fi network. If you want to switch back to the music stored on your iPhone, just reverse the process you used to select your iTunes library (tap More⇒Shared, and then tap My iPhone instead of the name of your iTunes library).

Home Sharing is simple, elegant, and free. If you’ve never used this feature, what are you waiting for?