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.

1. A firewall (blocks dangerous applications that could harm your computer)
2. A pop-up blocker (blocks advertisements that pop up when you click on a website. This means that any hidden viruses are blocked and you don't have a load of annoying adverts flying at you)
3. Email filter
4. An Anti-virus

So my last thing was an anti-virus. I am using the free edition of AVG Antivirus and it is great! They recently brought out the new edition called AVG Antivirus 8.0 (can get free by searching in a search engine and clicking on the Grisoft version [free.grisoft.com]) so you download it and then you follow the instructions to set it up. Once you have done all that you will now have AVG 8.0 Free Edition. With this you can start checking your computer for any viruses that you don't have. With this edition you are also checking your computer for spy-ware. When your computer finds any viruses or spy-ware it automatically sends it to the virus vault which you can check through and delete the files with the help from the program.

Also included with this product is a link scanner which when you search anything on a search engine it will automatically check the website to see if there are any viruses on it and if it goes green with a tick then it is to continue. The great thing about this program is that Grisoft are continuously updating and fighting the new viruses which come out every day so to make sure your AVG keeps up to date whenever you connect online you will be notified that an update is ready, so take a few minutes updating it and viola your system is ready to fight the latest viruses and the current and old ones if they choose to arrive. When you download any files you will always be at risk that the file has a virus in it so with AVG you can decide to scan it for viruses and if there is it will notify it. AVG is available for Windows and MAC computers and laptops.

So my third thing was to have an Email Filter. Now then AVG automatically scans all your emails when you receive them to combat viruses but that doesn't stop all the unwanted “junk” that comes your way so I have found a great little product called MailWasher. What it does is collect all your emails into the program then it waits for you to open the program and you then check through your emails and bouncing any spam that you don't want. Once you have figured out the spam from the genuine you can then set the program up so that it remembers the spam so that when you next receive it you get a little box saying “Blacklisted” and then you have others saying “Possible”. You now just bounce these emails and filter through your proper emails to read. Bouncing the emails basically means to send the same email back to the place where it was sent from so that this deters them to send any more to you. Mailwasher is free but if you want you can donate to it, search it in any search engine to download.

I also use a firewall which is run by Agnitum Outpost Firewall. This is the firewall which you decide what you want to block from being able to run without permission and what can run without permission from you.