ITunes - Features - Media Management - Library Viewing Modes

Library Viewing Modes

iTunes has four different views for music and video libraries – a song list, an album list, Grid View or Cover Flow.

The standard song list view displays library files with several detail fields.

Album lists are much the same as the standard list view, only the list is broken up by albums, with the artwork as the header of the list. Album lists were introduced in iTunes 10.0, and although this view allows users to browse content more visually, sorting the list view by name will accordingly break up the library into redundant instances of each album.

Cover Flow was introduced in iTunes 7.0 and it displays the album art as CD covers in a sliding format at the top of the screen. Under the album art is a small list of all the songs in that album. Compilation albums are only shown as a single album cover. If there is no album artwork, iTunes will display the default music note pictures.

Grid View is similar to Cover Flow, displaying the user's cover art in a grid rather than a side-scrolling format. While using this view mode, music can be grouped into album, artist, genre, or composer. Grid View was introduced in iTunes 8.0.

iTunes can also sort albums by artist or year, to make its artwork-centered interfaces more intuitive.