Cover Flow is a feature that lets you browse the cover art (of the albums) of your iTunes library. You can flip through your albums by dragging the horizontal scroll bar with your mouse, spinning the mouse wheel up/down, or even your arrow keys. Heck, Cover Flow even has a full screen option; this option makes your computer screen look like a sophisticated audio player.

Search

Although I am sure most people have noticed the search box, some might not know its full capability. The search box is capable of locating results in your library for the songs name, artist, genre, album, and even the equalizer setting. And for those of you who are too lazy to click onto the search box, all you have to do is start typing the name of the song you are looking for, and iTunes will automatically highlight the closest result.

Visualizer

Unless you have looked fairly deep, you may not have noticed that iTunes has a Visualization feature. For those of you who like to look at visualizations, when you've selected your song, press Ctrl + T, and it will switch to the visualization screen. Press Ctrl + T again to exit to the normal display.

Cover Art

I am sure everyone knows that you can add cover art to albums in iTunes, however, it is a fairly long process that can take a lot of your time if you don't use the convenient shortcut that Apple has provided. In the bottom left corner of iTunes, there is a box that you can simple drag images onto, and, just that like, that image is now set as the cover art for that album.

Mini-Player

Like all media players, iTunes has a mini player. This nice thing about this one is that it is very "mini". Most mini players of media players are still big enough, defeating the purpose of a mini player. The amazing thing about the iTunes mini player is that it is very small, meaning you can have it in a top corner of your screen, control it, and not have to worry about it getting in the way of your other programs. So if you are too lazy to switch to your iTunes window to change your song, then the mini player is for you.

Song Options

If you've ever wanted to make a quiet song louder (or vice versa), or wanted to cut out a slow ending or into, song options are something you will want to check out. Highlight the song you wish to edit, then press Ctrl + I, and click the Options tab. Here you can increase/decrease the volume, set a starting/ending point, and much more features solely for the selected song. Highlight multiple songs, and press Ctrl + I, to set options for all the selected songs; this beats doing this to each song individually if you are looking to edit multiple songs with the exact same changes.

Lyrics

For those of you with iPod touch's and iPhones, you will really like this feature. To access this feature, press Ctrl + I, then press the Lyrics tab. The lyrics feature is a simple feature that lets you write or paste lyrics for a song. Then, when listening to the music on your touch or iPhone, you can tap the screen and it will display the lyrics on the screen, then all you need to do is scroll down and read it. For those of you who are unable to sync notes from your computer, you can paste any text you wish into the lyrics section of a song, and you can put on a song, and then read through whatever text you added.

Locate File

If you're ever listening to a song, and want to find the audio file on your computer, for whatever reason, it is as simple as pressing Ctrl + R. This will immediately open up the folder containing the song, which is a faster method than looking for file manually, or even resorting to trial and error.

Preferences

Known in most programs as "options", preferences are something to check out for sure. To access preferences, press Ctrl + , (comma). Through preferences you can edit playback options, such as cross fade and shuffle, and simple preferences such as parental control and syncing.

Diagnostics

Diagnostics is a feature that checks important things such as your CD/DVD drive, network, connection, and iPod/iPhone connections. To access this feature, go to Help - Run Diagnostics. This feature takes literally less than a minute, and lets you know if all your drivers, etc., are working. This is good for anyone who is experiencing problems, as it can solve it fast and efficiently.

And there you have it, 10 iTunes features that you may have not been aware of. I hope this article has helped to improve your iTunes experience.

Windows media player, this is the default built in media player on the computer, it will play music, allow you to watch movies and burn music to a cd. The main problem I find with windows media player is that it sometimes doesn’t want to play certain DVD’s which becomes annoying and some music files it just doesn’t like.

Then there is real player, now I don’t mind real player for music files but if it comes down to using it for a DVD I would rather shoot myself, real player is brilliant for music it plays a lot of file types plus its size does it justice it doesn’t take up a lot of cpu power as it focuses on one thing unlike windows player.

Quicktime don’t use quicktime unless you need it for a quicktime movie, I have never liked quicktime it as given me the worst problems out of every media player I have ever used, best to avoid this one.

Now I come to the one that I really want to talk about, it is by far the best I have ever used in my life, VLC media player, it can play music and DVD’s I’m not sure if you can use it to rip and burn music but for the performance and the quality of this media player it can not be beaten. The best feature is the fact it can load .CUE and .BIN files, this is a great feature.

If I had to choose one I would have VLC and not the rest overall I believe it’s a good solid media player one of the best.