Apple has resurrected the sidebar in iTunes 12.4, making it an essential element for navigation your media. At first glance, it looks a lot like the sidebar that was in iTunes back in the day, but there are some differences. Here’s how to work with the sidebar in iTunes 12.4.
First, to navigate among the various media kinds, you use what Apple calls the Media Picker. That’s the menu above the sidebar. Here, you can see that Music is selected; you can click it and choose Movies, Podcasts, etc.
But you can also choose which types of media display in the Media Picker. Click the menu and choose Edit Menu. Check the media kinds you want to show in the menu. You can always access other media kinds from the View > Media Kind menu. Click Done to save your changes.
As for the sidebar itself, it displays a number of views. By default, for music, these are Recently Added, Artists, Albums, Songs, Genres, and Music Videos. You can choose which of these you want to see, and also add, if you wish, Composers and Compilations.
To edit the sidebar, right-click on that top section and choose Edit List. You’ll see this:
Check or uncheck what you want, and then click Done.
You can choose to view all your playlists or only those specific to the selected media kind. To do this, click on, for example, Music Playlists and choose All Playlists. For other media kinds, you’ll have options for Movie Playlists, Audiobook Playlists, etc.
There used to be buttons at the bottom of the iTunes window, below the sidebar, to create new playlists and folders. These buttons are gone, and you can create new playlists and folders from the File > New menu. You can also do this by right-clicking on the Music Playlist header, or at the very bottom of of the sidebar. If you have a lot of playlists, then you need to scroll down to get to what is a very small target.
