Two more tips about iTunes 11 from the readers of Mac OS X Hints:

While it’s not obvious, you can use the MiniPlayer in iTunes 11 when you’re in full-screen mode. To do so, switch out of full-screen mode, set iTunes to show on all desktops (right- or Control-click on the Dock icon, select Options > All Desktops), open the MiniPlayer as a separate window (Window > MiniPlayer), then click the full-screen button on the main window.

Note that if you have the MiniPlayer set to float above other windows (in the iTunes Advanced preferences), then it won’t display when you switch to iTunes. This makes sense, of course, because you don’t need it then. Also, this is the only way to get the MiniPlayer to work across spaces, if you use them. If iTunes is not in full-screen mode, then the MiniPlayer only displays in the same workspace as iTunes.

The second tip is about two ways you can quickly add songs to the Up Next list.

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There are a lot of changes in iTunes 11, including a new way to navigate among the different types of content in your iTunes library: from the keyboard. Reader kbradnam was the first to send in this list of keyboard shortcuts that you can use to switch the view between different sections of your iTunes library:

• Cmd + 1 = Music
• Cmd + 2 = Movies
• Cmd + 3 = TV Shows
• Cmd + 4 = Podcasts
• Cmd + 5 = iTunes U
• Cmd + 6 = Books
• Cmd + 7 = Apps

These shortcuts will only work if the corresponding sections of your iTunes library are enabled in the General pane of your iTunes preferences.

It's annoying that there's no easy way to create new reminders in Mountain Lion without launching the Reminders app itself. But an anonymous Hints reader did figure out a way to do so with Automator. The only hitches: All reminders you create with this workflow must go to the same list, with the same priority, and you can't automatically assign a due date.

Open Automator and opt to create a new service. At the top of the Automator scripting pane, choose No Input from the Service Receives drop-down and Any Application as the In option. Next, open the the Text actions library, choose Ask for Text and drag it to the right-hand part of the Automator window. Enter a prompt, such as Enter a Reminder. From the Mail library, choose New Reminders Item and drag that below Ask for Text. Choose a list to which you want to add the item. You can select a priority, but you probably don't want to select a Due Date. That done, save the service.

Now open the Keyboard preference pane in System Preferences, open the Keyboard Shortcuts tab, and find the Services section on the left. Select the service you just created and assign a shortcut to it. Now, you can hit that keyboard combo from any Mac app, and you should get a dialog box prompting you to enter a reminder.

Savvy Preview users know they can do some interesting things to PDFs—convert them to black-and-white or sepia tone, increase or decrease their lightness, and more—by selecting File -> Export, then selecting one of the Quartz filters in the resulting dialog box. Reader zpjet is one of those users, but he was never satisfied with results of the Reduce File Size filter (which he'd use when trying to make PDFs small enough to send by e-mail): It made them too small and made the graphics fuzzy.

After a little digging around, he found that these filters are located in the folder /System/Library/Filters, and that they're XML files that are easily edited with TextEdit (or any other text editor). Examining the file for the Reduce File Size filter, he found out why it didn't work for him: Two of the parameters—Compression Quality and ImageSizeMax—were just too low (0.0 and 512, respectively).

So he copied this file to his Desktop, made two copies of it, and then renamed all three: Reduce File Size Good, Reduce File Size Better, and Reduce File Size Best. Then he changed the parameters of each file: 0.25, 0.5 and 0.75 for Compression Quality (respectively) and 842, 1684, and 3508 for ImageSizeMax (ditto). (The first is A4-size at 72dpi, the second A4 at 144dpi, and the third A4 at 300dpi).

Finally, he changed the default string for the Name key at the end of each file—which is what displays in the Export menu—to match its file name. He then created a /Library/Filters folder and put all three edited files in it.

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Have you ever been annoyed to find that your Mac won’t go to sleep when you tell it to? Reader wjv found that, in Mac OS X 10.6 and later, there’s a simple way of finding out what’s keeping your Mac awake. To do so, run the following command in your Terminal: pmset -g assertions .

In the first section of output, you’ll see the status of two kernel assertions (essentially, assumptions the system makes about the state of your system) named PreventSystemSleep and PreventUserIdleSystemSleep. An accompanying status of 1 for either of these means that it is currently triggered. For example, here’s what I see when I run that command on my Mac mini:

Assertion status system-wide:
  PreventUserIdleDisplaySleep    0
  PreventSystemSleep             0
  PreventUserIdleSystemSleep     1
  ExternalMedia                  1
  DisableLowPowerBatteryWarnings 0
  UserIsActive                   0
  ApplePushServiceTask           0
  BackgroundTask                 0

Below that, you’ll see something like this:

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A new operating system means new reader tips, and we’ve been getting plenty of them for Mountain Lion. Here are two quick ones for two of the most popular OS X apps.

First, if you previously used iChat to send and receive screen shots or graphics, you may have used Quick Look to view them. More specifically, if you had the iChat File Transfers window open, you could click on an inline graphic that someone sent you in a chat and press the space bar to preview it with OS X's built-in file-viewer. In Mountain Lion’s Messages app, this no longer works. You can, however, click on the graphic right in the Messages window, then press the space bar to view the image in Quick Look.

Second, you no longer need to right-click and summon the Edit Name dialog to rename a bookmark in Safari's Bookmarks Bar. Now, in Safari 6, you can just click and hold the bookmark; the name will become editable, so you can rename it then and there. This applies to Safari 6 as a whole, which is provided with Mountain Lion, but which is also available for Mac OS X 10.7.

As you’ve probably heard, Safari 6 has a new combined URL and search field. If you type a search term into that field then press Return, you’ll get a Google page with search results. But, oddly, the URL for that Google search won’t appear in that search-address field; instead, the search term itself will remain there. This can be frustrating, because sometimes you want the URL for the Google results page, either to save or to share.

Macworld Senior Editor Dan Frakes recently tweeted a quick AppleScript that enables you to get that Google search URL. Many Tricks developer Peter Maurer suggested an improvement to the script, then Jordan Kay posted a final, one-line version of it. The sum of their collaboration: Run the following script and it will save the URL for the frontmost Safari tab to the clipboard; from there you can paste it wherever you want.

tell application "Safari" to set the clipboard to URL of current tab of window 1 as string

(To use the script, open AppleScript Editor, paste the above text in a new window, then save it as an application. You can then double-click that application to run it.)

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Couple of quick ones to welcome OS X Mountain Lion to Hints:

If you need a temporary break from all those alerts and banners, but you don’t want to turn off notifications altogether, Hints reader guillaumegete notes that you can pause the Notification Center with one click: Press the Option key while clicking on the Notification icon in the right end of the menu bar. This will pause the display of notifications. To reactivate them, you can either Option-click the same icon again; display notifications at the right of the screen by clicking on the Notification Center icon, then toggle the Show Alerts and Banners switch from Off to On; or just wait until tomorrow, when they’ll go back on automatically.

And an anonymous reader points out that, as of Safari 6 (which debuted with Mountain Lion, but is available for those still using Lion, as well), you no longer need to Control- or right-click on a bookmark in the Bookmarks Bar then fill out a dialog box in order to rename that bookmark. Now you can just click and hold the bookmark; the name will be highlighted and you can then rename it right there.

The default YouTube app that comes with iOS was great back in 2007, but it hasn’t seen a significant update in years and is lacking many features compared to the newer mobile YouTube website (m.youtube.com) that Google launched two years ago.

Reader seanm5 points out that you can stop iOS from launching the native YouTube app when you click on a YouTube link, and force it to use the superior YouTube mobile website instead. To do this, simply disable YouTube under Settings > General > Restrictions.

Once you’ve done that, all YouTube links you click on in an iOS browser will open YouTube’s mobile website; the native YouTube app will also be hidden. If you decide you want to revert these changes and go back to using the YouTube app for those links, go to the Restrictions settings and toggle YouTube back on.

Reader lucaslivingston has a WordPress blog, and wanted to make sure to back it up regularly. But while there are plenty of WordPress plugins that claim to do backups, he frankly found them daunting. Instead, he decided to create his own simple Mac-native solution using AppleScript, and then set up a daily iCal event to run that script at 4:00 every morning.

The script he came up with:

1. Simulates a double-click on the alias to the Web server where his WordPress blog lives, mounting it as a WebDAV volume (just like iDisk);
2. Runs the handy Unix backup command rsync to copy the remote contents locally; and
3. Unmounts the web server.

Here's the script. Open AppleScript Editor and paste the following into a new window, then save it as an Application:

set filepath to "Macintosh HD:Users:USERNAME:Library:Favorites:www.example.com"

tell application "Finder" to open filepath

delay 30

do shell script "rsync -av /Volumes/www.example.com/blog/ '/Volumes/Backup/wordpress-backup'"

tell application "Finder" to eject "www.example.com"

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When you use the volume controls on a Mac to increase or decrease the sound coming from your speakers, those levels increment in whole steps on a scale from 1 to 10: Press the Up Volume button once, for example, and the volume goes up one step out of ten.

But in versions of OS X prior to 10.7, it was possible to adjust the volume in smaller increments: If you held down Shift and Option before pressing the Volume keys on your keyboard, you could adjust the volume in quarter-steps instead of whole ones. For some reason, Apple removed this ability in OS X 10.7. But reader aGr[j5(6WU noticed that it has returned in 10.7.4—a change not mentioned in the release notes.

In addition to using this Shift-Option combination to control the volume more finely, you can also use it when you adjust the brightness on your Mac. Press Shift-Option, then press one of the brightness keys on a Mac keyboard, and you’ll notice that the brightness changes in quarter-steps. This is nice if you find your display is just a bit too bright or too dim.

Reader LMP showed how you can view all of an application’s graphical resources—its icons, pictures, UI (user interface) elements, and so on—quickly and easily by dragging the application icon onto the Preview icon. When you do this, Preview’s sidebar will show all of these items, and you can click on any one to view it in the main window.

With Keynote, for example, you'll gain access to all the graphical elements in the various themes the program contains; and with Pages, you’ll be able to see all the elements from the program’s templates. These latter programs’ contain thousands of graphics, so it may take you a while to wade through them all. But you might find something interesting.

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Have you ever found yourself on a webpage filled with animated GIFs? Annoying, aren’t they? Reader NoOH-Lye noticed that you can pause those GIFs in Firefox just by pressing the Escape key. You can do the same in Safari, but you need to hold the Escape key down to keep them from starting up again.

Safari’s Downloads pop-up (which opens when you click on the button in the upper right corner) offers some interesting features. Some of them you probably know about. (For example, double-clicking a file’s icon in the pop-up opens it, and you can copy a file’s URL by selecting it in the pop-up and pressing Command-C.) But Hints reader Bairnsfather pointed out one I didn’t know about: You can select a downloaded file in the Downloads pop-up and then drag it—to a folder, to your Desktop, or even to a Dock icon to launch it with that application.

Finally, if you’re short on hard drive space, check your copy of Google Chrome. When Hints reader itechguy.com did so, he found that the app was taking up 1.2GB of drive-space. The reason for the bloat: When he looked into the app’s bundle (by right-clicking and choosing Show Package Contents), he found multiple old versions of the app, all which appeared to be nearly identical. After he removed all but the most recent version, the app shrank to 113MB but still worked just fine.

(The explanation: When Google Chrome auto-updates, it keeps at least two of the most recent versions of itself. Those older versions should add up to about 225MB. But for some users, older versions weren’t being deleted. Several Mac OS X Hints readers posted comments that their versions of Chrome were very large, as much as 2.2GB.)

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If you get a lot of email, it can be hard to see the important messages among all the others that can clutter your inbox. Reader radek suggests a way to have the badge on Mail's Dock icon display only the count of the emails you really care about—those from people you know.

To set it up, first create a new rule: Go to Mail -> Preferences -> Rules, select the Inbox Rules tab, then click on Add Rule. Name the rule Personal Email then define it:

• Rule should match any of the following conditions: Sender Is in My Previous Recipients; or Sender Is in My Address Book.
• Perform the following action: Mark as Flagged, then select a flag color that you aren't using for something else

That done, create a smart mailbox called Relevant Email: Choose Mailbox -> New Smart Mailbox. Specify that emails in the smart mailbox should satisfy all of the following conditions:

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One thing that annoys many Lion users is "rubber-band scrolling": When you scroll to the end of a page in many apps, the page seems to continue scrolling a bit, then bounces back. OS X Hints reader Havner found a way to remove this effect. (He started from this anonymous hint about turning it off in Xcode, then did some research on Apple's discussion forums to find the answer for other apps as well.)

As with so many other 'hidden' settings in OS X, the fix for this is just a Terminal command away:

defaults write -g NSScrollViewRubberbanding -int 0

In Terminal, enter that command then press Return. It should stop the behavior in the Finder, Mail, Preview, and TextEdit, among other applications; it does not, however, work universally, Safari being one notable exception.

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There are plenty of ways to transfer photos from an iOS device to a Mac—I generally email them to myself or use Messages—but it can still be a hassle. A tip recently published on The Iconmaster could be my new solution to the problem.

First, make sure you have Photo Stream turned on in each of your iOS devices, as well as on your Mac. Next, go to your ~/Library/Application Support/iLifeAssetManagement/assets/sub folder. There, you'll see a bunch of subfolders with names like 013184d3f181aa175db7e48b08817861eff8cac25a. (If you aren't sure how to get to the Library folder inside your home folder, here are 18 ways to do so.) Perform a search for image files in this sub folder by typing kind:image in the search field and selecting Sub as the focus of the search. (If you take a lot of photos or screenshots, and only want to find one or the other, you could instead search for png for screenshots or jpg for photos.)

Now save this search as a Smart Folder by clicking on the Save button just below the search field. You can save it wherever you want: by default, it will go in the Saved Searches folder, but you can check the box that says Add to Sidebar if you want quick access from the Finder sidebar. You can also choose a different location for the Smart Folder, such as your Desktop. If you want this folder in the Dock, add it to the Dock by dragging the folder there.

That done, whenever you need to get quick access to a photo or screenshot that you took on an iOS device, just open this folder and find it. If you have a lot of files, you might want to add the Date Created column (right-click on the sort headers and choose Date Created from the list), then sort by this date (click on that header so the most recent date is at the top).

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Couple of quick ones today:

First, Macworld senior editor Dan Frakes recently reported that he'd inadvertently stumbled on an undocumented keyboard shortcut for deleting messages in Mail: Control-H. Hitting that key-combo does the same thing as the Delete key, sending messages to the Trash folder.

That might seem odd at first glance, but isn't really odd at all: Control-H is the Unix keybinding for the Backspace or Delete key. As a result, you can use Control-H to delete text in apps that use the Cocoa text input framework. Its ability to delete messages in Mail is an interesting side-benefit.

The second tip (from an anonymous Hints reader) is for those of you who use two calendar applications. If you do and if, say, you're switching from Outlook to iCal, you can drag an event from Outlook into iCal's window, and it will be duplicated in iCal. If you drag the event onto the iCal icon in the Dock, you'll get a dialog asking which calendar you want to use (assuming you have more than one), and the event will be added to it.

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In iTunes, there are two ways to categorize your videos: as either Movies or TV Shows. Movies are displayed individually, but TV shows are organized in groups, as they would be if they were episodes in the same show. One anonymous Mac OS X Hints reader takes advantage of this to organize all kinds of videos, regardless of their actual source. He uses his Movies library for very large files and puts everything else in TV Shows. So, for example, in his TV Shows library, he has groups called YouTube Videos, Home Videos, Work Stuff, and so on.

To create a group, first make sure both TV Shows and Movies are visible in the iTunes source list. If they're not, go to iTunes' General preferences and check Movies and TV Shows in the Show section.

Next, import your new video into iTunes by dragging it to the source list where these libraries display. In most cases, iTunes will categorize it as a movie. In the Movies library, select the video and press Command-I to display its Info window. On the Options tab choose TV Show from the Media Kind drop-down.

Now move over to the Sorting tab. Correct the Name tag that iTunes applied, if necessary. Next, enter a group name in the Show field. This is the trick: Video files that have the same Show name will be organized into the same group; so, for example, our anonymous Hints reader created "shows" called YouTube, Home Videos, and so on. Once you've entered the Show name, click on OK, and your changes will be applied.

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You probably know that you can configure the Dock to hide itself when you aren’t using it. (If not: Go to System Preferences -> Dock, and select Automatically Hide and Show the Dock, or Control-click on the separator in the Dock itself and select Turn Hiding On.) You may also have noticed that, if the Dock is hidden and you then move your cursor to the edge of the screen to make it reveal itself, there’s a slight delay before the Dock slides back into view. The delay may not be that long—maybe half a second—but it does irritate some users.

If you’re one of them, OS X Hints reader bahoom found that a simple Terminal command can make the Dock appear instantly. In Terminal, run the following command: defaults write com.apple.Dock autohide-delay -float 0 && killall Dock. That will change the setting and relaunch the Dock. When you move your cursor to the edge of your screen now, the Dock should reappear immediately.

If you ever want to restore the default delay, go back to Terminal and enter the command: defaults delete com.apple.Dock autohide-delay && killall Dock.

I use Dropbox to sync files across my Macs, but also to collaborate with others using shared folders. One day, I discovered that the disk space on my MacBook Air had dropped substantially. I started poking around, looking for swap files and other usual suspects, but eventually found one especially large folder hidden inside my Dropbox folder: .dropbox.cache.

Looking inside this folder, I found that it contained three dated folders, one each for the past three days. Inside each of those were a number of files; many, I could tell, were from my shared project folders. Because we use a versioning system on one of those projects, I could see multiple versions of many files. In all, I found 8 GB of cached files.

On a desktop Mac, that many files wouldn't be a big deal. But if you have a MacBook Air, in particular, without a lot of disk space to spare, it could be an issue. So, if you see yourself running out of room on your hard drive, check that folder and delete files that you know you don't need.

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Sometimes you want to send a file, URL, text snippet, or image from your Mac to your iPhone (or vice versa). I generally use email for this purpose, but Mac OS X Hints reader NaOH-Lye found another method (via MacDrifter): Use Messages.

If you have the Messages beta installed on your Mac, click on the Compose button at the upper left of the Messages window. At the To prompt, start typing your own name, then select your iMessage address from the list of suggestions. Then drag (or copy and paste) your file, URL, or text snippet into the text-entry field at the bottom of the window. Whatever you’re sending will appear on the “sent” side of the message pane; it will almost immediately appear in the “received” side, too. More importantly, it will almost immediately pop up on your iOS device as well.

This works in the other direction—from iOS to Mac—too, though it’s limited to text and images. For text, you obviously just type the text into the text-entry field. (This could be a handy way to take notes on your iPad, then send them quickly to your Mac.) For images, you tap on the camera icon, then select an existing image from your Camera Roll or photo library. This could be particularly useful if (like me) you have to take screenshots on your phone or tablet and send them to your Mac; it’s way easier than doing so via email.

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I recently downloaded a zip archive of freely-distributed MP3 files. But when I double-clicked it to decompress it, all I got was a .cpgz file (an archive file in the CPIO format). Double-clicking that file just created the zip file again, and thus I was stuck in an endless loop

Searching on Google, I saw that plenty of other people had come across the same problem. Some of them suggested some fixes, but none of those fixes worked for me. Some online posts suggested that I download the file again, because the first file might have become corrupted. But as it was a very large file, I really didn’t want to try that.

The solution for me was to use the free The Unarchiver, which turns out to be a Swiss army knife for decompressing many obscure types of archives. Opening the file with The Unarchiver decompressed it correctly.

In some cases, The Unarchiver may not work. If this is the case—or if you simply prefer using Terminal—you can try using the unzip command. Just launch Terminal, type unzip, then a space, then drag your archive into the Terminal window and press Return. That will decompress many files that are resistant to other techniques.

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In versions of OS X before Lion, you could quickly search for messages from a given domain (macworld.com, for example) just by typing it in the search field. But such searches are more difficult in Lion's version of Mail. That's because, when you type the domain name, the program will show you all of the messages that have been sent to or received from that domain, as well as any messages that contain that domain as a string of text in the body; it will also show you a drop-down suggestion-list of specific senders from that domain.

Reader pfernandes points out that there is a way to refine Mail searches to find all senders or recipients from a given domain: If you type from:@domain, you will see a list of all the messages you've received from any email addresses in that domain. You can also use to:@domain to look for the messages that you've sent to any addressees in it.

Note that you will see these search results in Mail's message-list pane after you type the search-term but before you hit Return. If you then hit Return, Mail will convert your search term into a token and treat it literally; in other words, it will look for senders (or recipients) whose addresses consist solely of the domain name and therefore return no results.

You probably know that you can choose keyboard shortcuts for Mission Control and Dashboard in the Mission Control pane of System Preferences. But the shortcuts listed there are limited. For example, for Mission Control you can choose function keys from F1 to F13, but you can’t select, say, F14 or F15; you have a few other options, such as the right or left Shift or Control keys. The same is the case for Dashboard, though it is limited to only the F keys.

Reader channui figured out a way to enter other keyboard shortcuts for these features. Just go to the Keyboard pane in System Preferences. In the Keyboard Shortcuts tab, select Mission Control or Dashboard and enter your keyboard shortcut there. It will automatically be reflected in the Mission Control preference pane. You can use this same procedure to set keyboard shortcuts for many other system features, such as Launchpad, the Dock (hiding and displaying), and so on.

The recently released iTunes 10.6 has plenty of notable new features, including support for 1080p video and some tweaks to iTunes Match. But many music lovers will appreciate one new feature in particular: In the past, you could automatically convert songs with a high bit-rate to a more manageable 128 kbps when syncing them to an iPod or iOS device. Now, with iTunes 10.6, you have three bit-rate options for that conversion: 128, 192 and 256 kbps.

To access this feature, connect an iPod (or iPhone or iPad) to iTunes, select the device, and go to its Summary tab. At the bottom of that window, in the Options section, you'll see the Convert Higher Bit Rate Songs To option. If you select that option, you can then choose the bit-rate you want from a drop-down menu.

Many iTunes users have been hoping for this option for a while. If you have a lossless library, it allows you to convert audio tracks with higher quality when you sync your iOS device. Note that this conversion can take a long time the first time around, but subsequent syncs will be much faster.

If you've been using OS X Lion, you've no doubt seen the dark linen pattern that Apple uses as a background for the login screen. That same pattern pops up in iOS 5, too. If you like that look and would like to use it as your everyday desktop background, OS X Hints reader rgetter found out how to make that so.

In the Finder, choose Go -> Go to Folder, and enter

/System/Library/Frameworks/AppKit.framework/Versions/C/Resources/
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Many of us use Finder labels to mark and more easily differentiate icons and files. There are several 'official' ways of assigning a label to a selected file: from the File menu, from the Action menu on the Finder toolbar, or from the the Finder’s contextual menu. But reader adipoos points out another way to assign labels that isn't so well known.

First, you need to sort your files by label; to do this, click the Arrange button in the Finder toolbar, then select Label from the list. (If you don’t see that button, choose View > Customize Toolbar and add it.) If you haven’t yet assigned labels to any of the files in the current directory, the Finder will sort them all into a single No Label category.

To make use of adipoos’s trick, you need to create a section for the label(s) you want to apply; to do that, you need to assign that label to at least one file. So, if you want to apply the Red label to a bunch of files, at least one file or folder must already be labeled Red.

To add a label to a file in the No Label section, just drag it from there into one of the sections labeled with a color; that label color will be applied immediately. Similarly, you can remove a label by dragging a file or folder from one of the colored sections into the No Label category.

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While I certainly like OS X's built-in spell-checking tools, I also find it somewhat annoying because it requires the mouse—first to click on the misspelled word, then again to choose the correct spelling. OS X Hints reader Zonker.in.Geneva points out that you can actually use the keyboard to correct spelling errors in programs—such as TextEdit, Mail, and iChat (or Messages)—that use Apple’s system-wide spell-check system.

For the trick to work, you must first enable two options in each program’s Edit -> Spelling and Grammar menu: Check Spelling While Typing (the While Typing part may be in a submenu) and Correct Spelling Automatically.

That done, when you misspell a word, press the spacebar to insert a space after it, then use the left arrow key on your keyboard to move the cursor back so it’s immediately after the misspelled word’s last letter. If you wait a second, you’ll see a list of suggested spellings appear. Using the up and down arrow keys, select the spelling you want from the list, then press Return. That will replace the misspelled word with the correct spelling. If you want to dismiss the pop-up, press the Escape key.

While this keyboard navigation doesn’t work in all programs—it won’t in Microsoft Office applications, for example—you may find it works in many of the apps you use regularly.

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Do you have video files that you'd like to have in audio form—say a music video you bought from the iTunes Store that you want to listen to on your iPod? Reader sabberworm has pointed out a nice hidden feature in iTunes that lets you do just that. He uses it to grab audio from video podcasts, but you can use it to save the sound from any video file as an iTunes track.

If you select a video in your iTunes library—this could be a music video, TV show, or concert video—and look in the Advanced menu, the Create AAC Version menu command is dimmed. (The format might be MP3 or Apple Lossless, depending on your import settings in iTunes' General preferences.) But if you press the Option key, this menu item changes to Convert to AAC (or, again, MP3 or Apple Lossless, depending on your settings). Select that command, and iTunes will happily rip the audio from the video.

I've written before about ripping audio tracks from DVDs, using Handbrake as a middle-man. But if you already have the videos, you can get their audio with iTunes using this menu item, as long as the video is in an iTunes-compatible format (.mov or .mp4).

Depending on what you want to do with this audio, you may want to use your default iTunes settings, or you may want to rip to Apple Lossless. Just remember that the audio quality will be no better than the original video's.

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If you use iTunes radio stations, you may have noticed that you can’t search in the Radio list; the search field is dimmed. But OS X Hints reader osxpounder pointed out that you can search if you put the radio stations in a playlist.

To do this, create a new playlist, then click on Radio in the iTunes source list. (If you don’t see it, choose iTunes > Preferences, then click on General, then check Radio in the Show section.) Click on a disclosure triangle to show the radio stations in a genre, such as Alternative, Blues or Classical. You can either choose specific radio stations and drag them to your playlist, or, if you want, select all the radio stations in a genre and drag them to the playlist. (You can’t drag the genre name to the playlist, though.) You can then search for a specific station within that playlist.

Also, you should display the Contents column in iTunes: choose View Options, when your playlist is selected, then check Comments. If so, your search will not only look at the names of the stations, but also the descriptions.