A later tutorial will explain how to send an album or a song by email from the iTunes store. But did you know that you can copy the track information as plain text? iTunes makes it very easy: find a song you want to share from your iTunes library, and you won't be able to copy all of its visible information as plain text, that you can then paste into it a document or on email. This tutorial shows you how to quickly copy all the information from the track in your iTunes library.
Copy a track's information from your iTunes library
Follow these steps to copy the information attached to a particular song in iTunes:
- If needed, open iTunes
- Find the song, audiobook, or track you are interested in sharing from your iTunes library
- Right click on the track you want, and choose "Copy" from the context menu
- iTunes has now put on the clipboard all the information visible about this track
- You can now paste this information as text inside a Word document, a Page document, or in an email, for example. The information you paste will look something like this:
...Coming from that sample track / song in your iTunes library:
- To display more information that you can copy as text, all you needs to do is show or hide more columns inside your iTunes library: show, hide, resize, or move columns in iTunes.
- And this is all it takes to copy all the information about a song or track inside your iTunes library, and then paste it anywhere you want as plain text!
Copy as text multiple tracks / songs in iTunes
The same steps can be applied on a playlist or filtered subset of songs in your iTunes library:
- Click on a playlist, or create a selection of songs from your library
- Once you have isolated the songs whose information you want to copy, click on first track
- Then, hold down the Shift key, and click on the last song of the group
- Finally, right-click on any of these songs, and choose "Copy"
- iTunes will copy all songs as plain text, one per line, to your clipboard
- Note that if you are planning on printing this list, there are better options in iTunes: see how you can print from iTunes (a list of songs, a playlist, etc.)
Tip: this technique to copy the track information as text only works inside your iTunes library; you cannot right-click on an item inside the iTunes store to get the same effect. But, as we mentioned earlier, when you're inside the iTunes store you have the ability to email a link to that particular item something we'll show you in another tutorial. The copying as text trick works on both Mac and Windows.