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Okay, here's a pretty simple tip, but one you may not have known you could do.

In iTunes, you all know how to edit the info tags, right? It's the same as getting info on a file from within the Finder; you just select the song you want, then hit Command+I on the keyboard (or select Get Info form the File menu). Click the Info tab in the window that opens, and you'll see the following information:

Fair enough, but let's say you want to add an entire album's publication year to the info list, or that you want to change the genre to something a little more accurate, or even that you want to add artwork. For a long time, I actually did this field by field, track by track for a whole album. Oh, foolish me, as this can easily be addressed in one fell swoop.

To select multiple tracks (in this case the entire Metaphysical Graffiti album by the Dead Milkmen), you simply click the first track of the album in your iTunes library, hold the shift key on your keyboard, then click the last track. Everything in between will be selected.

Now, you'll again hit Command+I on the keyboard. This pulls up an entirely different information window. (If you have done this before, you may first see a warning message asking if you really want to apply your changes to all of the songs. Go ahead and shut this warning off, as it's not likely you'll be accidentally selecting multiple songs in iTunes. If you do, the radically different options window will clue you in that you've made a mistake.)

All of your batch options are there, each with a check box. When you make a change to a field, the check box is automatically filled in. Notice the difference between the screen capture above and the screen capture below, where've I've added/changed information in the Year, Genre and Equalizer Preset fields. The checkmark means that these entries will be changed for all selected songs, while the information in fields that aren't checkmarked will not be affected.

Click okay, and your changes are applied. Simple enough. But, why would you want to do this? Numerous reasons. This is a great way to add artwork if iTunes couldn't find it automatically. See the artwork field at right center in the screen capture above? You can simply drag your artwork from the desktop to this field.

This is also a great way to bypass the iTunes or iPod volume adjustment, which really tends to whack out the playback level of your songs. Simply set the Volume Adjustment slider to None, or adjust accordingly to make sure one album plays at the same level of the other albums by that audience. This is especially helpful when you're making playlists of your favorite songs from various sources.

Of course, many of you won't care to attach this much information to your audio tracks. That's fine. Where it really comes in handy, though is when you start to create Smart Playlists in iTunes (which we'll be addressing soon in an Applelinks Hands-On Mac article). It's also very important if you've downloaded Apple's iQuiz, which was actually the incentive for the article. iQuiz is a fantastic little 99 cent trivia program that looks at the tracks on your iPod to quiz you on your own music. However, it generates the questions based on the info tags attached to each song. So, if you don't have the publication year assigned to a particular album, iQuiz has to eliminate that album from the possibility of answers. Same with album artwork. If you have 70 albums on your iPod, but only three have album artwork, those will be the only three to appear in the album artwork questions.

So, if you now have the incentive to fill out those info tags but have an iPod full of music staring at you, don't let the weight of it get you down. By batch selecting songs as instructed above, you'll get through them all much more quickly than you'd think.