Master album playing in iTunes with these top tips

Playing songs using iTunes on the Apple Mac is straightforward and you can select one and click the play button. Playlists are also easy, but how do you play a complete album with all of its tracks? What if you want to play the tracks in a different order?

In this article we take a look at some of the different ways in which you can play albums in iTunes on the Apple Mac. You may know some of these tricks, but you might not know all of them.

Select My Music in the toolbar at the top and if it does not show a collection of album covers, go to the menu at the right hand side and select Albums. There are some useful options for sorting the albums to make it easier to find the one you want, such as listing them by artist fist and then by title or title and then artist, and so on.

Now that all the album covers are displayed in the iTunes window, right click any of them and select Play on the menu. That was easy.

If you want to know what tracks are on the album, there are a couple of options. You could click the album cover to open up the album details panel. This lists all the tracks and, if the tracks are stored on iCloud, then there is a cloud icon at the right side of the track.

Another way to play all the tracks in an album is to open the panel as shown above, click the first track to select it, Shift+click the last track to select them all, and then click the Play button at the top. All the selected tracks then play.

The currently playing track is shown at the top of the window and clicking the menu button to the right of it lists the tracks in the order in which they will play. This enables you to see what is coming up next.

Suppose you want to play the tracks in a random order. This is achieved by clicking the crossed arrows at the left side of the name, just by the mini album cover. Click it to make it turn blue, then return to the playlist menu and you will see that the tracks are now in a different, random, order.