[Macworld]

Post your comments for Checking on iTunes' unchecked items here

[konsup]

This feature can also be a nightmare if you think that it applies only to highlighted items in a playlist, say one album in your entire library. At least it's a bummer if you've painstakenly unchecked a whole lot of songs in your library and have to redo it all. It does NOT apply to selected items, but ALL items.

[Chris Breen]

konsup said:

This feature can also be a nightmare if you think that it applies only to highlighted items in a playlist, say one album in your entire library. At least it's a bummer if you've painstakenly unchecked a whole lot of songs in your library and have to redo it all. It does NOT apply to selected items, but ALL items.

Right. But you can diminish the damage by using iTunes' Search field to look for a specific thing ? Beatles, for example ? and then do a mass check or uncheck with just the results. Even if you originally searched the main Music library, your actions only affect those items. When you return to the broad view, you see only those items have been changed.

Or you could pull things out into playlists and do it there.

[cweber]

This brings up an issue I've grappled with:
Among all the cool features to manage music (and other media) in iTunes I rarely use the checkbox. I have maybe 6 songs unchecked.
The only real use I found is to control which songs of a playlist are being burned onto a CD.
So my question to everyone: Which creative or productive uses have you found for the checkbox?
Looking forward to any and all answers.

[pdrayton]

If you have a lot of holiday music, and you also enjoy listening to your entire library on shuffle, unchecking all of the holiday music means you won't suddenly find yourself listening to Jingle Bells in July.

That's one of the many reasons I use the "uncheck/check all" technique.

[Rhywun]

cweber said:

Which creative or productive uses have you found for the checkbox?
Looking forward to any and all answers.

Simple. Checked items synch to my iPod. Unchecked items don't. Unchecked items are anything I don't care to hear on my commute: symphonies, comedy routines, and other very long tracks.

[drefractor]

Typically if I like enough songs from an album, I will buy the CD and rip it to iTunes uncompressed (AIFF). I can then play these tunes lossless in my music studio or on Airtunes to the house stereo with "high" fidelity.

OTOH, my iPod gets 192K AAC files that are checked when I hook up the iPod for synching. So my library has two versions of each song, the "native" AIFF which I can convert to whatever digital compression scheme comes down the pike (if I need to for some reason), and 192K version that I use for now on my iPod.

A couple of smart playlists makes toggling the check boxes quite simple as the article mentions.

[mfinocchiaro]

What are folks using to backup playlists? Since they aren't saved in the xml or itunes library files, I am not sure what to back up to ensure I don't lose them...
Great tips though!! There is so much functionality that it is easy to miss something so easy but yet so useful!

[azreboot]

You can make the Unchecked playlist a lot more easily by just doing
Playlist / is / Music AND
Playlist / is not / All Checked
That should do it!
(Btw, "Genre / is not / Podcast" could fail if you happen to have a podcast with a custom genre. "Podcast / is false" is better.)