I get lots of questions about some of the basics of iTunes. These are things that may not be that obvious, but are practical to know and can make your use of iTunes more efficient. Heres a selection of some iTunes tips.
Theres no way in iTunes to see which playlist is playing. If youve started playing music in one playlist, then clicked something else, the playlist with the music wont look any different. However, theres a way to immediately jump to the current track that youre listening to: just press Command-L. This will highlight the currently playing track, in the location where you started playing it. So if you started playing music in a playlist, the song will be highlighted there; if you started playing in your Music library, iTunes will highlight it there.
iTunes offers a setting to exclude tracks from shuffling. In this case, go to your Music library then display the Column Browser (press Command-B if its not visible). Click the genre you want to exclude from shuffle. (If you dont see a Genre option, go to View -> Column Browser and select Genres to add that column.) Select all the tracks, then press Command-I to display the info window. Click the Options tab, then choose Yes from the pop-up menu next to the Skip When Shuffling option. Click OK and iTunes will prevent all of these songs from shuffling, both in iTunes and on any iPod or iOS device. You can do this for any genres you want to exclude from shuffling.
If you ever want to change it backsay when its Christmas seasonjust select all the tracks and change that setting to No.
Alternatively, you could create a smart playlist with music whose genre isnt Holiday and use that as the basis of your shuffle.
When iTunes gets tag information for a CD, sometimes that information has mistakenly set the infamous Compilation tag to Yes. You can change that. Select all the tracks you want to change, then press Command-I and click the Options tab of the info window. Next to Part Of A Compilation, select No from the pop-up menu and choose No, then click OK.
In theory, yes, and its called Sound Check. To use it, go to iTunes -> Preferences and choose the Playback tab. Now check the Sound Check option. When you do so, iTunes will start analyzing all of your songs, and apply a positive or negative volume adjustment to them. When you play music back, these adjustments will be taken into account.
But you should know that this feature is far from perfect. iTunes determines the average volume of a track, so a song that starts softly and ends loudly may still sound out of balance with the track before or after it.
You can sort any playlist by any of the columns that you see in iTunes. You probably clicked on the Name column header by accident.
In the screen shot below, you can see that the first column header is highlighted in gray, meaning that its the current sort column. The triangle in it points upward, meaning that it sorts in order. In this case, this is the order that the songs were added to the playlist (which happens to be the album order).
So, to get your Purchased playlist back as it was, you want to click on the column header above the numbers; if, when you do this, the triangle is pointing in the other direction, click again to reverse the sort order. You can do this for any column you wish.
Note that theres also a Date Added column that you can enable for any library or playlist (choose View -> View Options and put a check next to Date Added).