Switching to the Grid View in iTunes 9 or 10, you’d likely think that there isn’t a way to change the size of the individual album art and make them smaller or larger, but there is.

To be able to do so though, you’d first have to select View > Grid View > Show Header in the application menu.

You’ll now see a header with buttons that allow you to sort the artwork by Albums, Artists, Genres and Composers.

But more importantly, there is a slider bar that lets you change the size of the artwork icons. Two square buttons on either side of the slider bar lets you minimize or maximize the icon / album art size by clicking on them.

According to this discussion, the Finder and enough hard disk space is all you need to perform a backup of your iTunes library.

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.

This tip has been updated for iTunes 8.0.2, but first, here’s the story.

I’m on a MacBook Pro 2.4 GHz, and I launch iTunes.

I create a smart playlist, called “To delete”, in iTunes to collect all songs with a 1-star rating.

My intention is to physically obliterate these songs from my hard disk – I don’t ever want to see them again, not in this lifetime anyway.

I just want to free up some HD space, and moving these unwanted songs into the Trash is taking the first step.

Here are the steps I followed to physically remove the selected songs from a playlist:

1. Navigate to the smart playlist.
2. Highlight all the songs.
3. Press alt (option) + command + delete to get the prompt to remove these tunes from iTunes and move them to the Trash.
   

Ken Rockwell shares his settings for importing music into iTunes.

Read also the related discussion on Digg for more ideas.

In a nutshell, you’d want to import using the 128 kbs Variable Bit Rate (VBR) AAC setting, which Ken claims produces AAC files with sound quality that is virtually indistinguishable from source CDs.