As with any other program, iTunes windows can be resized by dragging the bottom right corner and can also be minimized, hidden from view but still active and accessible via the Dock (on a Mac) or the taskbar ( on a PC). This is done the usual way: on a Mac, click the little yellow button in the upper left corner of the window or press Apple+M; on a PC, click the minimize button in the upper right corner of the window, or press M while holding down the Windows key.
This is all standard stuff, but unlike most other programs, iTunes also offers a middle ground between an open and minimized window: a miniaturized unit that gives you access to essential player control and, if you want, the status screen.
This is great if you want to control what’s playing, skip tracks you don’t like, etc., while working in another program. To turn iTunes into a miniature player, click the little green button at the top left of the window (Mac) or press Ctrl+M (PC). The mini player that appears can be further reduced by dragging its corner.
Start/end times
If something at the beginning or end of a track has bothered you for a long time — a long fade, a concert recording clap, a bit of indulgent band banter, or whatever — now’s your chance to remove it. Whether you ripped the track from a CD or downloaded it, you can complete it in iTunes. Take, for example, “Good Morning, Good Morning” by The Beatles, which begins with a rooster crowing. If you listened to the song and kept an eye on the iTunes status area, you’d see that the rooster’s moment of glory lasts a good two seconds, and the band doesn’t start playing until the screen reads “Elapsed Time: 0.03.” .
To delete the offending bird, we must first select the track in the Song List and select Get Info from the File menu. Below the Options panel in the box that appears, there are boxes for the song’s current start time (which, unsurprisingly, is 0:00) and the end time. Now we can simply highlight the start time and type in a new value, in this example 0:03 seconds. We can then click OK and listen to the song again to see if the new settings are accurate enough. If not, we can go back to the Options panel and adjust the time, entering fractional seconds after the colon if necessary (for example, 0:03:50).
Trimming the end works the same way. And whichever end you’re changing, it’s not damaging the song file, just the way iTunes plays it, so none of this is permanent. If you feel bad about the rooster, for example, you can simply go back to the options panel and reset it.