iTunes and You
This chapter is from the book
This chapter is from the book
This chapter is from the book
A high-performance automobile is little more than an interesting amalgam of metal and plastic if it’s missing tires and fuel. Sure, given the proper slope (and, perhaps, a helpful tailwind), that car is capable of movement, but the resulting journey leaves much to be desired. So, too, the iPod is a less-capable music-making vehicle without Apple’s multitrick media manager/player, iTunes. The two—like coffee and cream, dill and pickle, and Fred and Ginger—were simply meant for each other.
To best understand what makes the iPod’s world turn, you must be familiar with how it and iTunes 8 work together to move music (as well as pictures, videos, and games, in the case of some recent iPods) on and off your iPod. In the following pages, you’ll see just that.
Getting the Goods
You have three ways to get tunes into iTunes:
- Recording (or ripping, in today’s terminology) an audio CD
- Importing music that doesn’t come directly from a CD (such as an audio track you downloaded or created in an audio application on your computer)
- Purchasing music from an online emporium such as Apple’s iTunes Store
The following sections tell you how to use the first two methods. The iTunes Store is a special-enough place that I devote all of Chapter 5 to it. The iTunes Wi-Fi Music Store gets its due in Chapter 6.
Rip a CD
Apple intended the process of converting audio-CD music to computer data to be painless, and it is. Here’s how to go about it:
- Launch iTunes.
- Insert an audio CD into your computer’s CD or DVD drive.
By default, iTunes tries to identify the CD you’ve inserted. It logs on to the Web to download the CD’s track information—a very handy feature for those who find typing such minutia to be tedious.
The CD appears in iTunes’ Source list under the Devices heading, and the track info appears in the Song list to the right (Figure 4.1).
Figure 4.1 A selected CD and its tracks.
Then iTunes displays a dialog box, asking whether you’d like to import the tracks from the CD into your iTunes Library.
- Click Yes, and iTunes imports the songs; click No, and it doesn’t.
- If you decided earlier not to import the audio but want to do so now, simply select the CD in the Source list and click the
Import CD button in the bottom-right section of the iTunes window (Figure 4.2).
Figure 4.2 iTunes’ Import CD button: Let ’er rip.
iTunes begins encoding the files via the method chosen in the Import Settings area. (You reach this area by clicking the Import Settings button in the General preferences tab.) By default, iTunes imports songs in “high-quality” AAC format at 128 Kbps. (For more on encoding methods, see the sidebar “Import Business: File Formats and Bit Rates.”)
- Click the Music entry in the Source list.
You’ll find the songs you just imported somewhere in the list.
- To listen to a song, click its name in the list and then click the Play icon or press the spacebar.
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Import Business: File Formats and Bit Rates
MP3, MPEG-4, AAC, AIFF, WAV . . . is the computer industry incapable of speaking plain English?
It may seem so, given the plethora of acronyms floating through modern-day Technotopia. But the lingo and the basics behind it aren’t terribly difficult to understand.
MP3, AAC, AIFF, and WAV are audio file formats. The compression methods used to create MP3 and AAC files are termed lossy because their encoders remove information from the source sound file to create these smaller files. Fortunately, these encoders are designed to remove the information you’re least likely to miss—audio frequencies that humans can’t hear easily, for example.
AIFF and WAV files are uncompressed, which means that they contain all the data in the source audio file. When a Macintosh pulls audio from an audio CD, it does so in AIFF format, which is the native uncompressed audio format used by Apple’s QuickTime technology. WAV is an AIFF variant used extensively with the Windows operating system.
iTunes supports one other compression format: Apple Lossless. This format is termed a lossless encoder because it shrinks files by removing redundant data without discarding any portion of the audio spectrum. This scheme yields sound files with all the audio quality of the source files at around half their size. iTunes and the iPod also support the H.264 and MPEG-4 video formats. These, too, are compressed formats that allow you to fit a great big movie on a tiny iPod.
Now that you’re familiar with these file formats, I’ll touch on resolution as it applies to audio and video files.
You probably know that the more pixels per inch a digital photograph has, the crisper the image (and the larger the file). Resolution applies to audio as well. But audio defines resolution by the number of kilobits per second (Kbps) contained in an audio file. With files encoded similarly, the higher the kilobit rate, the better-sounding the file (and the larger the file).
I emphasize with files encoded similarly because the quality of the file depends a great deal on the encoder used to compress it. Many people claim that if you encode a file at 128 Kbps in both the MP3 and AAC formats, the AAC file sounds better.
The Import Settings menu (which you reach via the General preferences tab) lets you choose to import files in AAC, AIFF, Apple Lossless, MP3, or WAV format. The Setting pop-up menu is where you choose the resolution of the AAC and MP3 files encoded by iTunes by choosing Custom from the menu. iTunes’ default setting is High Quality (128 Kbps). To change this setting, choose Higher Quality (256 Kbps) or Custom from the Setting pop-up menu. (Spoken Podcast is another option when you choose the AAC Encoder, but it produces quality that’s good only for spoken-word audio.) If you choose Custom, the AAC Encoder dialog box appears. Choose a different setting—in a range from 16 Kbps to 320 Kbps—from the Stereo Bit Rate pop-up menu (Figure 4.3). Files encoded at a high bit rate sound better than those encoded at a low bit rate (such as 96 Kbps). But files encoded at higher bit rates also take up more space on your hard drive and iPod.
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Figure 4.3 The Stereo Bit Rate pop-up menu.
The preset options for MP3 importing include Good Quality (128 Kbps), High Quality (160 Kbps), and Higher Quality (192 Kbps). If you don’t care to use one of these settings, choose Custom from this same pop-up menu. In the MP3 Encoder dialog box that appears, you have the option to choose a bit rate ranging from 16 Kbps to 320 Kbps.
Resolution is important for video as well. Fortunately (because an explanation beyond this gross simplification is beyond the scope of this slim volume), iTunes allows you only to convert video to iPod/iPhone-compatible format by choosing Advanced > Create iPod or iPhone Version. This command provides no tools for adjusting resolution settings.
Move music into iTunes
Ripping CDs isn’t the only way to put music files on your computer. Suppose that you’ve downloaded some audio files from the Web and want to put them in iTunes. You have three ways to do that:
- In iTunes, choose File > Add to Library.
When you choose this command, the Add To Library dialog box appears. Navigate to the file, folder, or volume you want to add to iTunes, and click Open (Figure 4.4). iTunes determines which files it thinks it can play and adds them to the library.
Figure 4.4 Navigate to tracks you want to add to iTunes via the Add To Library dialog box.
- Drag files, folders, or entire volumes to the iTunes icon in Mac OS X’s Dock, the iTunes icon in Windows’ Start menu (if you’ve pinned iTunes to this menu), or the iTunes icon in either operating system (at which point iTunes launches and adds the dragged files to its library).
- Drag files, folders, or entire volumes into iTunes’ main window or the Library entry in the Source list.
In the Mac versions of iTunes, by default you’ll find songs in the iTunes Music folder within the iTunes folder inside the Music folder inside your Mac OS X user folder. The path to my iTunes music files, for example, would be chris/Music/iTunes/iTunes Music.
Windows users will find their iTunes Music folder by following this path: yourusername/My Music (XP) or Music (Vista)/iTunes/iTunes Music.
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You can use the same methods to add compatible videos and movies to your iTunes Library. Those videos will most likely appear in the Movies playlist in the Source list.
I say most likely because there are a few exceptions: Videos specifically designated as music videos appear in the Music playlist, and videos designated as TV shows appear in the TV Shows playlist. See the sidebar “Tag, You’re It” at the end of this chapter for information on how to apply those video designations.