Preferences
PowerTunes offers a variety of preferences that allow you to customize its behavior. You can access these by choosing the "Preferences" menu item from the PowerTunes menu (or by pressing command-comma).
General preferences
- Quit PowerTunes after closing the main window: If this option is checked, closing the main PowerTunes window will automatically quit PowerTunes. However, if you want to be able to leave PowerTunes open without its window cluttering up your screen, you can uncheck this option. This can be useful if you plan to use PowerTunes' dock menu to switch between libraries.
- Bring iTunes to front when launching: When you open iTunes using PowerTunes, either by clicking the "Open iTunes" button in the toolbar or whenever you open a specific library, the iTunes window will be brought to the front if this option is checked. If you uncheck this option, then whenever you open iTunes, the iTunes window will open up in the background, leaving the PowerTunes window as the frontmost window.
- Ask before deleting a library: By default, PowerTunes will double check and ask when you use the "Remove Library" command to remove a library from your library list. If you don't want to see this warning, you can uncheck this option.
- Use small library icons: If you end up creating a large number of libraries, your list can get large enough that you won't be able to see the whole list at once. Checking this option will reduce each row in the library list to half its normal height, allowing you to view more of your libraries at once.
- When renaming library, also change library filename: Normally, the name you assign to a library in PowerTunes isn't necessarily the same as the name of the actual iTunes library file (or the folder that contains the library file), so changing one will not affect the other. If you check this option, then whenever you change a library's name in PowerTunes, PowerTunes will also rename the library file on disk, and vice versa. (You can read more about library naming in the "Organizing your libraries" section)
- Automatically check for updates: PowerTunes has the ability to check for new versions of the program, as well as automatically downloading and installing the new version without having to download the file manually using a web browser. Check this option if you would like for PowerTunes to perform its automatic checking (you can also check manually by selecting "Check For Updates" from the PowerTunes menu)
- New libraries use preferences from: PowerTunes keeps a separate iTunes preferences file for each of your iTunes libraries. This allows you to have different settings for different libraries (e.g. you can have one library automatically copy imported files into its media folder, while another library can have the opposite setting). Whenever you create a new library, PowerTunes creates a new preferences file for that library. If you select "None" from the pop-up menu for this setting, a "clean" preferences file will be created which will give you the same settings as a default installation of iTunes. If you have your own set of preferences that you'd like to be used for any new libraries you create, you can select one of your libraries from the pop-up menu, and any new libraries created will be given the same set of iTunes preferences as the selected library.
Music copying preferences
- Preserve song options: When copying tracks from one library to another, PowerTunes can also copy any information stored in iTunes associated with those tracks that isn't embedded in the music files themselves. If you don't want some of these pieces of data to be transferred, you can uncheck the box for each field you don't want to be transferred, or uncheck the "Preserve song options" box to not transfer any information at all.
- Copy album artwork: This option determines whether PowerTunes copies non-embedded artwork when copying music and video between libraries. For more details on how this is handled, refer to the Copying Album Artwork section of the documentation.
- Don't copy podcasts tracks: Since PowerTunes cannot automatically copy podcasts between libraries, it is likely that you will not want to copy individual podcast tracks between libraries, since they will no longer be associated with their podcasts in the new library. This option is checked by default, but you can uncheck it if you wish to manually transfer tracks that belong to a podcast to another library. The tracks will be "normal" tracks in the destination library, and will appear alongside your non-podcast music and video
- Don't import duplicates: If you have tracks which exist in more than one library and want to prevent multiple copies of a track from ending up in one of your libraries as a result of copying music or video to another library, you can check this option to tell PowerTunes to skip importing any tracks that are detected as duplicates. You can read in detail about how this works in the Handling Duplicates section of the documentation