Shaun Chapman

The perfect iTunes view for large libraries

While iTunes 9 provides us with three views, it takes a little tweaking to get a view suitable for large libraries. In order to understand why it is indeed the best view, I have to first explain why the other views suck.

Cover Flow

Cover Flow is really slick. It looks amazing, image rendering is crisp, and it looks like the sweet ass jukeboxes we all love (everybody needs a little retro action in their lives). However, every time you open iTunes, the album artwork is loaded into memory and it takes a while. When this is happening, things get a little choppy. Also, it takes a long time to scroll through a long list of albums sideways.

Cover Flow is purty

Grid view

Grid view is great for people who have many full albums as opposed to Miley Cyrus and Katy Perry singles (you know who you are).

I fell in love with grid view at first. It displays albums in relatively little screen space. The problem is it’s impossible to look at five columns of album artwork at once while scrolling. Unless you’re Kim Peak and can read both pages in a book at the same time, you have to move your eyes back and forth and back and forth and back, etc. It gets really annoying and I frequently find myself scrolling past the album I’m trying to find.

You may be thinking, “just use the search box,” but the problem is I don’t always remember the name of the album I’m trying to find, especially if I’ve recently added it to my library. Hey, give me some slack. I listen to a lot of music!

Grid view

List view

In the early days of iTunes, list view was the only view. One problem with it is there is so much redundant information—namely the artist and album names. Look at that! TV On The Radio, TV On The Radio, TV On The Radio, TV On The Radio, TV On The Radio, TV On The Radio. It’s not necessary. As you can see, a lot of screen space is wasted.

List view

Wouldn’t it be great to separate the stuff that’s different for each song from the stuff that’s the same? I agree. Let’s make it happen!

Creating the perfect iTunes view

Newer versions of iTunes allow you to add an artwork column (click the little arrow to the left of the song name column). This gets us a little closer to the perfect view. On the left is the album artwork with the artist and album name below it. Sweet, now we can get rid of the redundant columns on the right.

List view with artwork column

You can hide the artist and album columns by right clicking the column bar and deselecting them. Gotcha! If you hide both the artist and album a problem arises—it no longer sorts by artist. Now, it sorts by song. What a mess. Unfortunately, you have to keep either the artist or album column. Let’s keep the album column.

Here’s a trick to keep things even more organized. Click the album column repeatedly to scroll through album sorting options: Album, Album by Artist, or Album by Year. Pick one of those. I prefer Album by Year because it sorts by artist then cronologically by album year. It makes the most sense to me. You may disagree and choose to use Album by Artist.

List view with the artist column removed

The only problem now is it takes forever to scroll through a large library. iTunes 9 brought a change to the artist/album/genre browser. Now it’s a lot more customizable (View > Column Browser). With the space we gained from removing the artist column we can now add the artist browser on the left, allowing us to quickly select individual artists. Bingo!

The perfect iTunes view

This configuration gives us the most information (with as little redundancy as iTunes 9 will allow) in a small amount of space while keeping it organized.