While iTunes does a great job of keeping track of all the music that you’ve purchased on both your Mac and your iPod/iPhone with its Purchased Playlists, it doesn’t include any purchased music that you’ve restored from backup CDs or that you may have imported into your music library another way.

I know that I was extremely disappointed the first time I imported in all my music files to iTunes after a fresh install and found NOTHING listed in my Purchased playlist.

Luckily, iTunes lets you create your own Smart playlists so you can filter through your library and find all the music you’ve purchased on the iTunes music store.

Custom Previously Purchased Music Playlist

To rebuild a purchased music playlist you’ll need to:

1. Create a new Smart Playlist.
2. Check Match “ANY” of the following rules:
3. Set the first rule to “Kind” “Contains” and then type in “Protected AAC audio file”
4. Since Apple announced iTunes Plus files you’ll need to also add another rule with “Kind” “Contains” and type in “Purchased AAC audio file”
5. Check the Live updating Box and click OK

Your newly created smart Previously Purchased Music Playlist should now appear under your playlists. Selecting it should display all the music you’ve purchased on iTunes.

Over the past few years iTunes has emerged as the leading point of sales for music both on and off the internet. The media selection in iTunes is always growing and including more and more ‘new’ types of media like podcasts.

There may be times where you’d like to point visitors to your website to some interesting content included in iTunes but you haven’t been sure exactly how to point to the specific location in the iTunes store.

Thankfully, Apple has provided a tool to help us add links to the content in the iTunes store we’re interested in sharing.

If you navigate to the iTunes Music Store Link Maker you can search the iTunes store for the exact content you’d like to link to on your site. Take the search results and click on the arrow next to the content you’d like to link to. Get the link code and add it to your site to point your site visitors to the media you’d like to them to check out.

For example, I love listening to podcasts! A podcast that is new to me is MacCast. If you like keeping up with news related to Apple products then check out this podcast. To help you find the podcastI’ve gone to the iTunes Music Store Link Maker, searched for MacCast, grabbed the code, and included it here:

Apple recently announced at Macworld 2008 that they would start renting movies from ALL the major motion picture studios. With all the excitement many people forget that you can still buy movies on iTunes. Movies are for sale from Paramount, Lionsgate, MGM, as well as all the studios currently owned by Disney.

Paramount seems to have the largest library. All of these studios are also renting some of their features while just offering others for sale. Fox, Sony, and the other major studios have started to allow rentals through iTunes (requires version 7.6) and these movies will be viewable on the computer, ipod, iphone, and apple tv.

To access movie rentals open the iTunes store and go to the movie section. There will be a number of areas advertising movies for rent. Feel free to browse through the available movies by content categories or searching for a title that you hope is currently available. The library is continually being updated so you may have to wait to watch a certain movie on your new iPod Touch while riding public transportation into work.

If you’re like me and have a number of songs or mp3 files in your iTunes library that are missing the name, artist, and album and you’re not sure who sings it you need to look no further.

ieatbrainz is an application for Mac OSX that uses the sounds from the song to help it determine what song it is and then updates the meta data information for the file.

To update your iTunes library, download ieatbrainz and then after launching the application, select the songs you want to update the information on and it will scan the files, compare them to the musicbrainz database and then display what it has determined to be the name of the song you’re looking up.

Be sure to look at each songs because sometimes it will offer a number of options that are potential matches. After you accept the suggested changes from ieatbrainz it will update your iTunes Library with the additional information.

After you’ve added the missing information, be sure to have iTunes go out and get the related album artwork so that you can browse your library in Full Screen mode on the latest version of iTunes.