Apple Training Series: iLife 06

There's a lot to look at in the iTunes interfacebut perhaps the best way to get familiar with it is simply by putting a CD into your drive and seeing what happens. You can follow along with your own CD as you watch Christopher begin the process of making a CD for the birthday party.

When you insert an audio disc into your Mac's Combo drive (or SuperDrive; it works for both CDs and DVDs), your CD will show up as a "source" in the left column, and details about ita list of songs and their durations, among other thingswill appear on the right if you're connected to the Internet. Christopher begins with a little Sheryl Crow.

Playing Songs and CDs

Once your CD is onscreen, you can use iTunes as a simple CD player. You don't have to do anything fancy with iTunes in order to listen to it. The fast way to play a song is to double-click a line item in the song list. But if you want to see what you're doing, follow these steps.

1.

Using your pointer, single-click a song title; a blue bar will highlight it.

2.

Click the Play button.

The play and volume controls are together in the top left of the window. While a song is playing, the Play button turns into a Pause button (click it again to pause the song).

Note

The spacebar on your keyboard also acts as a Play/Pause button.

Also, while a song is playing, a speaker icon appears next to it in the leftmost column of the list of songs.

As the song plays, look around at the iTunes window. At the top of the window is the album and song information, along with a bar representing the length of the song. A little black diamond shows what part of the song is playing. You can grab this diamond and scan backward or forward in the song.

There are also Forward and Reverse buttons alongside the Play/Pause button. Click either of these to skip to the next (or previous) track. Press and hold to scan through the track you're listening to.

When the song you initially selected is done playing, iTunes moves on to the CD's next track. Notice, however, that the blue selection bar stays where you started, although the speaker icon hops to the next song. This can be confusing at times.

Tip

If you want to know what song you're listening to, look for the speaker icon and ignore the blue bar.

The checkmark next to each song title indicates that you want iTunes to play that song (if the opportunity arises) or import that song (in the event that you're pulling music into your Mac). Deselect a title, and iTunes will ignore the songeither skipping it when you import or, if it's already in your computer, skipping it when you're playing a list of tunes.

Using Automatic CD Album Information

What if you insert a CD and it shows up on your desktop merely as "Audio CD"? What if your CD shows up in iTunes but is clearly devoid of key informationnamely, song and album titles? It surprises many people to learn that the song info you see in iTunes doesn't come from the CD. It comes from somewhere external to your Mac.

Here's the deal: Although your Mac can certainly tell that this is a music CD, and one that has, say, 14 songs of varying lengths, it doesn't know anything more specific about the album and its contents. And that is why you want your Mac connected to the Internet. Your Mac alone can't tell you this information, but a wonderful online database (called the Gracenote Compact Disc Database, or CDDB) is available to help. iTunes can gather this information automatically if you set it up to do so (which you did when you went through the Setup Assistant the first time you launched iTunes). If you loaded your favorite CD and the screen looked too blank for you, check to see that your Mac's connected to the Internet; then do the following.

1.

Select Audio CD in the Source list.

2.

Choose Advanced > Get CD Track Names.

This will access the Internet and find the information you seek from the CDDB.

Once the process is complete, the iTunes window should look similar to before, but with lots of useful data onscreen.

Now that you can play the CD in your Mac using iTunes, it's a good time to take a closer look at other sources in iTunes and how you work with them.

Understanding iTunes Sources

When you open iTunes the first time, you'll see a big, empty table that you'll use to organize and ultimately play your music. You may want to close the iTunes MiniStore pane by clicking the Show or Hide the MiniStore button along the bottom of the window.

The organizational structure of iTunes is similar to that of iPhoto; you may even recognize it as similar to that of the Mac OS. On the left side of the window is a Source list. Your CD is a source. Choose a source, and details about its contents appear on the right side (although your other iTunes sources may not yet have any contents to reveal).

And just as the Mac OS offers a handful of different kinds of sources (hard disks, CDs and DVDs, connected servers, and so on), each with its own distinct icon, iTunes has a few of its own sources as well.

  • CDs show up in the Source list only when you have a CD in your Mac. Eject a CD, and it will disappear from this list.

  • Library is the big container that will hold all of the audio files (songs, albums, downloads) you put on your Mac, including, of course, the songs you import from CDs. You'll create subsets of this potentially enormous collection to make it easy to find the songs you're looking for. When you move songs from CDs into iTunes, you're loading music into your library.

  • Music Store is the oft-mentioned iTunes Music Store, where you can (legally!) download songs or albums directly into your iTunes collectionstreamlining the process of building your library.

  • Playlists are malleable, expandable collections of songs that you build yourself. They are the heart and power of iTunes. Since you make them yourself, you won't see any playlists in the Source list when you start up, but soon you'll have many.

    Note

    There are, of course, other sources, although you can ignore them for the time being. Podcasts are downloadable radio-style shows. Videos are those you've purchased and downloaded from the iTunes Music Store. Radio uses your Internet connection to bring you online music channels for your listening pleasure. 90's Music, My Top Rated, Recently Played, Top 25 Most Played, and Party Shuffle (which selects songs from your library or chosen playlist) are special sources that are built for you. The automatically generated playlists are signified by a small round gear icon in the Source list. It's easy to explore them on your own, but you can disregard them for this book.

Selecting and Importing Songs and Entire CDs

Getting music from a CD into your Mac is pretty simple. In the parlance of hipsters everywhere, the act of importing songs is called ripping.

The time it takes to import an album (or song) depends on a few factorsnotably the speed of your Mac (a dual-gigahertz G5 will import an album faster than an 800 MHz G3, for instance). Import speed is measured by how much faster it is to import a song than to play it. A 10X import, for instance, will rip a 5-minute song in 30 seconds or a 60-minute album in 6 minutes.

Note

Casual observation indicates that a 300 MHz G3 rips at around four times faster than real time; a dual-gigahertz G4 rips at around 10X; and a dual-gigahertz G5 at 20X. For one or two songs, those differences are relatively small. But if you're moving 300 CDs into your music collection, the difference between ripping 4 albums per hour and ripping 20 per hour is significant and will radically impact your productivityand probably your enjoyment of this experience.

1.

Select your CD as your source.

2.

Make sure there's a checkmark next to the titles of all of the songs you want to import into iTunes, and uncheck any songs you don't want to import; those will remain on the CD, never to see the inside of your computer.

3.

Click Import CD.

Notice that once a song begins to import, the information bar at the top of the iTunes window indicates the song being imported, the speed of the import, and the time remaining to complete the task.

While importing, iTunes places a small orange import icon in the leftmost column of your track list, where the speaker appears when you're playing a song.

By default (as set in the iTunes Preferences), when you start to import tracks, iTunes will also start to play them. (It can do both simultaneously.)

Note

Although playing while importing is generally an OK thing to do, it can be confusing too. The song that's playing is not necessarily the one being imported, and vice versa. Casual importers may find themselves waiting for the album to finish playing, not realizing it finished importing long before. If you want to stop songs from playing, click the Pause button (or the spacebar); this won't affect importing. Keep an eye on the import icon and the track info at the top of the window to see your progress.

When it has completely imported a song, iTunes changes the import icon to a green checkmark. When it's done importing the entire CD, it politely alerts you with a three-note sound.

Now that you've ripped your first CD, eject it and insert another. Rip a few more CDs and then move on to the next section.

Note

By default, iTunes creates AAC audio files, which are considered an excellent audio format with good sound quality and a small file size. Unfortunately, some MP3 players don't support it, and you might want to have MP3 audio files instead. You have control over the method and quality of compression that iTunes uses to copy a song. To adjust the settings, choose iTunes > Preferences > Advanced > Importing. From there, you can adjust the Import Using pop-up menu and select an audio format.

AAC is also known as MP4 (the successor to the MP3 format). You might recognize it as the format of the songs that you purchase from the Apple Music Store as well as from streaming music providers such as XM and Sirius. Other formats include AIFF and WAV, which are standard audio formats that provide very high sound quality but generate large files. Commercial CDs tend to contain AIFF sound files.

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