After initiating the download, a Genius Recommendations bar pops up with a thank you message and a list of related songs for purchase.

(click to view a larger version)

Here’s what you need to do if the file you’re playing in QuickTime isn’t loud enough and the volume slider is already at the maximum position.

You’ll just need to hold down the Shift key while you press the Up arrow key. There won’t be any visual indicator that the volume has actually increased when you do this, so you’ll have to let your ears be the judge.

I do get the impression that the volume increase is only one level or “click” beyond the indicated maximum, and remains just slightly softer than what I get with the VLC media player at 400% volume.

To get the volume down to the normal max loudness, just hit the Up or Down arrow key once.

This technique works in iTunes too.

Here’s a workaround, but one which I haven’t tried yet – there is a website, globalitunes.org, which I had read about in the comments to the post Set up an iTunes account in Malaysia.

You’d first need to set up a fake US address, which is documented in their setup guide.

For this post, I’ll assume that you’ve let iTunes manage all your music files, which means that all your music data is located in the iTunes folder. To find out how iTunes manages your music folder organization (or not), simply launch iTunes, open up Preferences and navigate to the Advanced tab. You should see the following:

Incidentally, this tab also shows you the physical location of your iTunes library. Make a note of this.

Here’s how I’d proceed with the backup.

Find out how big your iTunes library is

Open the Finder and change to icon view mode. The icon view mode presents information in an easy to read fashion for this purpose.

If your sidebar has the Music folder icon there, click once on it. Otherwise, locate your Music folder by clicking on your Home icon (that’s the icon with your machine’s name on it) and navigate your folder structure until you find the Music folder.

Open the Music folder and highlight the iTunes folder by clicking once on it.

Then, show the Info window by pressing cmd + i, or select File > Get Info from the menu, or right-click (control + left-click) on the folder and select Get Info from the contextual menu:

Copy the entire iTunes folder

In my example, I have about 8.45 GB of music files and iTunes meta / database data. Rounding it up, I’ll need about 10 GB of space on the target media (say, an external drive) to copy the entire folder into.

That’s all you need. Connect an external drive to your machine, and use the Finder window to copy the entire folder into the destination disk.

To restore the files to your machine (or another), simply drag the entire iTunes folder from your backup drive into the Music folder on the computer.