iTunes tips and tricks

I recently bought a second generation iPod Touch, mainly for the app store or rather, the games in it :) Check out a list of the better ones here... I already bought a copy of Vay and have 40 or so downloaded applications (all free ones though) Some apps (Google Earth) are only on the US iTunes store (also you cant download Album Art or use Genius Playlists from the India store) Its not hard to get into the US iTunes store though...

This is a 2nd Generation iPod Touch, so can't be used with third part tools, cant be jailbroken but has an internal speaker, external volume controls, microphone capability and a faster processor.

Over the years, I have gathered a fairly large collection of music, most (all?) of which has no id3 tags, is unsorted and has no album art. Now this doesn't seem to work well with iTunes at all, which for some reason refuses to display folders. So, some tips:

1. Tag as much of your library and sort it out into folder by artist. One of the best tools for this is MusicBrainz Picard. This amazing app can group your tracks into an album using what little information is available, identify your tracks using their accoustic fingerprinting if all else fails and even download cover art using plugins.
2. The iPod touch can be used to rate songs in album view mode. If you have your iPod set to manual synch, your ratings will not get copied over to your iTunes library. You can download a nice script to do this for you here.
3. Use smart playlists judiciously (there is a nice sample set here). I suggest creating one on the iPod Touch to contain all your unrated songs. Then at synch time, use the recently played playlist to rate the songs on your iPod from iTunes itself.
4. You can set the play order of the songs in a genius playlist to match the sort order in iTunes using the "Copy to Play Order" command.
5. Pressing Home and Power together will take a screenshot
   

Check out some other tricks here. BTW, if you ever need to move your iTunes libray (to say another machine), there are a few guides here and there but the best one I found till now is here.

I have just seen Rab Ne Bana Di Jodi, and the movie, while good, is something of an exercise in sado-masochism (sort of helpless masochism for Shahrukh's character and sadism to us for watching and enjoying it)

Update 12/24/2008: Here's a guide on how to turn any MP3 into a iTunes Audiobook