MacMost Now 226: Using iTunes DJ

Learn about the new iTunes DJ playlist and how to control the music from your Mac or iPhone. You can also have friends request or vote on songs they want to hear from their iPhones.
You can also watch this video at YouTube (but with ads).
Video Transcript: Hi, this is Gary with MacMost Now. Brought to you by Square Space. For a great way to create your own website, visit MacMost.com/squarespace. On this episode, let's take a look at iTunes DJ. So recent updates to iTunes has given us iTunes DJ. It's basically an enhancement to the party shuffle playlist. Let's go and take a look. When you go into the iTunes DJ which appears under playlists in your sidebar, you get a list of songs chosen from the ones in your library. It will try to choose the favorites if you've been rating them. Then you get to see what songs are playing now, or about to play if you haven't started the playlist. And you also get to see what songs are coming up. You can go ahead and select a song and move it up or down in the playlist so pick one up and move it to play next. You can also go ahead and select a song and delete it. The first time you do that, it will prompt you to make sure you really want to do that. You can say don't bother me with this dialog anymore and you can easily delete songs. Notice when I delete a song, it instantly adds a new one to the bottom so it always keeps the playlist populated. Now even while your iTunes DJ is playing, playing the current song, you can go into your music library and you can select any song you want and control click on it. When you do so, you can get several different DJ selections here. One is play in iTunes DJ, which will play it right now, replacing the current song that's playing. Another will be to add it to list but add it to the next song to play, which is probably the most useful. Another will be to add it to the bottom of the list in iTunes DJ. So when you are in iTunes DJ, there is a settings button. I'm covering it right now, but I click on it and I get this dialog box and here you have a couple controls like how many songs to display that were recently played, how many upcoming songs to have in the list. You also have the ability to allow guests with iPhones or iPod Touches that are connected to your WiFi network, to be able to play songs. The first thing you need to do if you're having a party is to open up your WiFi network and give everybody the password so they can use their iPhones or iPod Touches to connect to it. Once they're connected, if you've allowed this, they can go ahead and run the Remote application from Apple, which is a free app, and you can go ahead and give them a welcome message when they connect saying 'hey, welcome to my party. Feel free to request from my library.' Whatever you want. You can then have them request songs, but you can also enable voting so people can vote on the upcoming songs to maybe move them up or down in the list. You can also set to require a password so not everybody connected to your network can request songs. So you have an open network, you don't have to worry about the neighbors requesting songs. In addition to being able to use the remote application for friends to be able to request songs, you can use it to actually control your entire iTunes DJ playlist. The first thing you would do is connect to your library using the Remote application from Apple. Then you would have to enter a code in iTunes giving your iPhone permission to completely control iTunes. Then when you go into the iTunes DJ playlist, you can move songs up and down, you can remove them, you can add songs to the playlist. You have complete control, just like you do in iTunes. You can find the free Remote application from Apple by going into iTunes, into the store, searching for Remote, and you'll find it right there. So basically the idea is that you set your Mac up with some speakers at the party, have your entire music collection on it, then you get it playing with the iTunes DJ. You walk around the party, don't need to go near the computer to control what's going to play next. You give a few of your friends the ability to request songs so you can just basically let the party decide what's going to play. That's a quick look at iTunes DJ. Give it a try if you're having a party coming up. Until next time, This is Gary Rosenzweig with MacMost Now.
MacMost Now 226: Using iTunes DJ

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