iTunes


The free iTunes application enables you to burn CDs, which makes purchasing third-party software tools less necessary if all you want to burn are audio CDs. In addition to ripping (recording audio CDs and encoding them in MP3, AIFF, or WAV format) audio from CDs, iTunes also writes audio CDs from MP3 collections called playlists, by using a compatible CD-RW drive. Additionally, you can download MP3 files to a variety of MP3 players, such as the Nomad and the Rio and play streaming audio from a huge assortment of Internet radio stations. You can also purchase songs in AAC format online from the iTunes Music Store.

Playing MP3 and CD audio with iTunes

The iTunes window, as shown in Figure 20-16, is divided into panes. The tall, slender pane on the left of the window is the Source pane. In the Source pane, you determine from where you select your audio. You can make audio selections from your iTunes Library, Internet radio, a mounted audio CD, a connected MP3 player, or a playlist.

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Figure 20-16: The iTunes interface.

Playing songs

To play songs, you can do the following:

  • Double-click the song.

  • Select the song and press Return or Enter.

  • Select the song and click the Play button.

You can also move between adjacent songs by using one of the following methods:

  • Press z- (previous song) and z- (next song).

  • Choose Controls Previous Song or Controls Next Song.

When a song is playing, iTunes displays your choice of a progress bar or equalizer display. The progress bar is shown in Figure 20-17 — you can position or reposition playing to any point in a song by dragging the progress bar playhead (the diamond) to the desired location. To view the equalizer display in this area, all you need to do is click the little arrowhead to which the arrow pointer is pointing in the figure.

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Figure 20-17: The iTunes progress bar lets you position the playhead anywhere within a song, if you only wish to listen to a part of the tune, or if you wish to replay a passage.

In Figure 20-17, you see the song title displayed at the top of the progress area. Click this line of text to switch between song title, artist, and album name. Over time, this information automatically cycles between the three possibilities.

Note

iTunes takes title, artist, and album information from what are called ID3 tags — textual information stored within an MP3 file. A number of other fields are also described by ID3 tags, which are discussed later in this Chapter.

Below the title-artist-album line is the timeline, which you can also click, switching between Total Time, Elapsed Time, and Remaining Time.

The equalizer display gives you a light show depicting what is happening on the two output channels (left and right speakers). If you hear an imbalance in the sound, you can utilize it to see if your problem is because of one of your speakers or if the recording is unbalanced. You can adjust the equalization with the Equalizer window. The button to display the Equalizer is shown in Figure 20-16. Clicking the Equalizer button shows the Equalizer window shown in Figure 20-18. Clicking the pop-up menu shows a wide range of preset equalization options.

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Figure 20-18: The iTunes Equalizer window adjusts balance of audio ranges.

Tip

Clicking the iTunes window zoom button (+) reduces the window to just the controls at the top left and the progress area. Further, the buttons are now positioned vertically at the left edge of the window with close (X) on top, minimize to dock (–) in the middle, and zoom (+) on the bottom. Clicking zoom again pops you back to the original size, which is an easy way to keep the window around in an unobtrusive manner.

Managing your iTunes Library

The iTunes Library is the collection of all the MP3 songs you’ve played in iTunes (less those you’ve deleted from the iTunes Library), plus all those you’ve added using File Add to iTunes Library or by using the Import button when a CD is selected. The iTunes feature adds the song to your iTunes Library whether you’ve double-clicked an MP3 file on your Desktop or in a Finder window or imported it from an audio CD. If you look in your home folder’s Documents folder, you see an iTunes folder. This folder contains a database file, which keeps information on the 32,000 songs that iTunes can handle. This iTunes folder also contains an iTunes Music folder, and inside it are more folders that contain the songs in your iTunes Library. The folders inside the iTunes Music folder are named for performers, and each performer’s folder contains folders with the names of album titles.

If you download MP3 files from the Internet, you can add them to your iTunes Library by performing the following steps:

  1. Choose File Add to Library.

  2. Locate the item (folder or file) you want to add.

  3. Click the Choose button.

Listening to Internet Radio

iTunes supports an ever-changing and growing list of Internet radio stations, divided into categories. Just click the disclosure triangle next to the genre of interest and then select the radio station of interest. You need to have an active Internet connection first as iTunes doesn’t make one for you. Of course, if you have an always-on broadband connection, such as a T1, DSL, or cable modem connection, remembering to make an Internet connection isn’t a problem. (Chapter 6 explains how to make an Internet connection.)

Tip

Select stations where the Bit Rate field is lower than your connection speed. For example, if your modem cannot actually get a 56K connection, then you should avoid 56kbps streams.

Downloading to digital MP3 players

Digital MP3 players are well supported by iTunes. As long as your MP3 player is on the list of supported devices (see Apple’s iTunes Web page because this list grows constantly), you can hook it up by using the supplied USB cable and have it show up in your source list. Select your MP3 player in the source list and see its contents, from which you can delete or add items. Adding items to your MP3 player is very simple — just select the songs you want to add from the iTunes Library or a playlist and then drag the songs to the MP3 player in the source list. You cannot play items on the MP3 player in iTunes or move items from the MP3 player to iTunes.

Using Apple’s iPod MP3 player

The iPod MP3 player is tightly integrated with iTunes. If an iPod is connected to a Firewire-equipped Macintosh and the iPod is selected in the Source list of iTunes, an iPod window appears, as shown in Figure 20-19, and the Eject button becomes an Eject iPod button. Clicking the iPod button displays the iPod Preferences window, shown in Figure 20-19.

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Figure 20-19: Use the iPod Preferences window to change how iTunes and an iPod work together.

Making use of playlists

The playlist is a powerful and useful feature in iTunes. A playlist is like a folder containing aliases to your audio songs. You can create a playlist by clicking the “Create a playlist” button (the plus sign button in Figure 20-16 shown earlier) and then naming it in the source list. Playlists let you group songs that you like to hear together and put them in the order you want to hear them. Just select them from the iTunes Library and drag them to the playlist group in the source list.

Note

An alternate and often easier method of creating a playlist involves selecting the songs in the iTunes Library list and choosing File New Playlist from Selection (z-Shift-N). iTunes creates a new playlist entry with the name selected for your editing pleasure. When you then select the playlist, the selected songs are displayed in the song list window. Doing this is a great way to create a playlist containing songs by a particular artist.

Clicking the Shuffle button, the Playlist button with the crossed arrows, you can randomize the order of items in a playlist. Clicking it again reverts you to the original order. You can also click the Repeat button to loop a playlist.

You can also work with subsets of a playlist without creating a new playlist just by deselecting the boxes next to the names of the songs you don’t want played.

If you want your playlist to open in its own window, just double-click the playlist’s icon. To delete a playlist, for example after burning your own CD of it (see the next topic), just click the playlist’s icon to select it and press Delete or choose Edit Clear.

Smart Playlists are a new feature of iTunes in version 3 and up. With Smart Playlists, you can have iTunes automatically create and update playlists as you add and remove music from your iTunes Library.

Recording your own audio CDs

Possibly the most useful feature of a playlist is that it, combined with a compatible CD-RW drive, lets you write audio CDs suitable for use in most standard CD players. Just create your playlist by dragging the songs into the order you want them to appear, checking the time at the bottom of the window to make sure that your material fits on a CD (usually either 74 minutes or 80 minutes), and clicking the Burn CD aperture in the upper-right corner of the window. iTunes asks you to insert a recordable CD into your CD burner and then to click the Burn CD button. At that point, just sit back and relax while iTunes creates your CD. You can listen to music while iTunes burns the CD. The burning process is shown in Figure 20-20.

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Figure 20-20: iTunes creates audio CDs for you from your MP3 playlists, if you have a compatible CD burner.

Note

You can set iTunes to automatically start whenever a blank CD or DVD is inserted into the drive with the CDs and DVDs pane of System Preferences, covered in Chapter 13.

Although you can record to a CD-R or a CD-RW and have no difficulties reading the disc on your computer, your experiences using such discs in commercial audio CD players can vary widely. Many standard CD players, especially those made more than three or four years ago, have problems reading CD-R media. Even more have difficulty with CD-RW media. The reasons for these difficulties are rooted in the methods used to record the data on the different media. Standard CDs have physical pits in an aluminum (or other metallic) surface, below the transparent layer encasing the metallic disc. A player’s laser detects those deviations in the surface to read the stored data. A CD-R emulates this pitting with charged layers of a photosensitive dye. A CD-RW emulates this pitting with a chemical compound, which crystallizes when heated to the correct temperature, but returns to its liquid state when heated even more and then allowed to cool. In any event, the lasers in many older CD players do not operate at a wavelength that allows them to read CD-R or CD-RW media. Before purchasing a CD player, check to see whether its specifications are CD-R compatible.

Blank CD-R media typically has two sizes listed — one in minutes and one in megabytes. The two most common sizes are 74 min/640 MB and 80 min/700 MB. When you’re recording audio to a CD, only look at the time figure. The megabytes figure refers to data CDs.

Note

Another type of CD player can play both audio CDs and what are called MP3 CDs. These MP3 CDs are actually data discs, which are written in a format known as ISO 9660 and can contain literally hundreds of MP3 files. iTunes can create these CDs, but not all CD players will play them. You can play them on your Macintosh computer. You may also archive music to DVDs with iTunes if you have a DVD burner such as Apple’s SuperDrive.

Working with iTunes song and album information

The iTunes window (refer to Figure 20-16) has a large pane dedicated to displaying information about the songs in the currently selected source — playlist, audio CD, MP3 player, or iTunes Library. By choosing Edit View Options, you can control which of the 13 tag fields defined in the ID3 standard are displayed.

With the exception of the song field, which iTunes keeps on the left, you can rearrange the order of the other columns by dragging a column header over another column header. The column with the dark header is the column by which the display is sorted. The small arrow at the right of the selected column header indicates whether it is an ascending (A–Z) or descending (Z–A) sort, and you can reverse the order by clicking the header.

Looking up album information

The i in iTunes stands for the Internet. Not only can it stream radio from the Internet, but it can make use of the CDDB (Compact Disc Data Base) at www.gracenote.com to look up information about your CDs, retrieve song names, album title, artist information, and other pertinent information.

If you select the Connect To Internet When Needed box in your iTunes Preferences (on the General tab), iTunes automatically connects to the Internet when you insert an audio CD. If you want iTunes to check manually, choose Advanced Get CD Track Names.

Note

The information in the CDDB has been submitted by various people and sometimes more than one person submits album information for a CD, resulting in slightly different entries (spelling differences and the like) for the same CD. CDs are recognized by the number of songs and the respective lengths of those songs. Thus, if two different CDs have the same number of songs and each corresponding song is the same length, you may have to choose the appropriate entry. The CDDB is a useful tool, but it isn’t infallible.

Entering song information manually

You can enter or edit song information manually by using in-place editing or a dialog for songs that are on your hard disk. You can even edit song information for songs on CD-ROMs and other locked sources. iTunes holds the information you enter in its database, overriding any information previously obtained from the Internet. Naturally, iTunes can’t change the song information on the CD-ROM or other locked source itself. You may have some songs stored in locations that prevent you from editing their information. Songs on noneditable media, such as CD-ROMs, are not editable in this way because iTunes cannot write the information back to the read-only media. For example, you can’t edit the information of songs that are located in a folder to which you have read-only access, such as the Public folder of someone else’s home folder.

In-place editing is a straightforward Macintosh editing operation. Just click to select the record; then click in the text field to select it and start typing. To avoid the typing hassle, you can select a song and choose File Get Info (z-I) to display the Song Information panel, as shown in Figure 20-21. You can navigate to adjacent songs by using the Prev Song and Next Song buttons.

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Figure 20-21: Use the iTunes Get Info window’s Info panel to enter information about a song.

Watching iTunes visual effects

If you find the iTunes song lists boring while you’re listening to your favorite tunes or a book on disk, you can replace the window’s contents with iTunes Visual Effects.

You start and stop the show by clicking the Visuals On/Off button, which is located in the lower-right corner of the iTunes window (review Figure 20-16). Alternatively, you can choose Visuals Turn Visual On or Visuals Turn Visual Off (z-T). You can also use the Visuals menu to set the size of the visual effects show. Three sizes are available for show within the iTunes window (Small, Medium, and Large) as well as a Full Screen (z-F) mode.

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Special iTunes Symbols

iTunes employs some graphic symbols for specific purposes. The following table describes the ones you’re most likely to encounter and gives a description of what they mean.

Moving waveform

Indicates the song is being currently being imported

Circled exclamation point

Indicates the song can’t be located

Speaker

Indicates the song being played

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Pressing the I key while the effects are on displays information about the song, which gradually fades out. Pressing the ? key presents a list of some of the key options. This list is not comprehensive — maybe that’s why it’s called Basic Visualizer Help. Some other keys that affect the Visualizer are Q, W, A, S, Z, and X — all of which switch among the effects being used. The first two cycle forward and backward through the lists of first effects, the next two through the list of secondary effects, and the last two through the list of tertiary effects.

Searching your iTunes Library

As we described earlier, you have control over which columns are displayed and how the song list is sorted. The Search area at the top of the window (seen previously in Figure 20-16) acts as a filter. Any text you enter there limits the songs presented in the song list area to those that contain the text in one of the displayed columns.

When the iTunes Library is selected in the Source pane, a Browse button appears in the upper-right corner of the iTunes window (where the Burn button is for a Playlist). Clicking the Browse button reveals extra filtering control lists, as shown in Figure 20-22.

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Figure 20-22: Click the Browse button to filter by genre, artist, or album.

Note

For the Genre column to appear, you must select the Show Genre When Browsing checkbox on the iTunes Preferences General tab.

Making a choice in one list restricts the choices to only those for the given selection in lists to the right. For example, selecting Comedy under Genre narrows the choices in Artist to only those artists who have songs with Comedy in the Genre tag field. If you select an artist, only the albums for that artist are listed in the Albums column. For this reason, filling in the ID3 Tags is very important if you want to browse your iTunes Library effectively. Only the genres, artists, and albums you have in your iTunes database appear in the various lists. We discuss ID3 tags in more detail shortly.

Removing songs from your iTunes Library

Removing a song from your iTunes Library is simplicity itself. All you need to do is select the song in the Library’s song list and press the Delete or Clear key. Doing so does not remove the song from your disk, though.

If you want to remove the song from both the disk and the Library, the easiest method is to perform the following:

  1. Select the song in the Library’s song list.

  2. Control-click it and choose Show Song File from the contextual menu to display the file in a Finder window.

  3. Now, just drag the file into the Trash (z-Delete).

  4. Return to iTunes and press the Delete key with the song highlighted.

Managing ID3 tags

Songs you download from the Internet may appear in iTunes with incorrect or unreadable titles and other information. This can be due to the file having been created with a program that stores song information differently than iTunes. Song information is stored in MP3 files in what is called ID3 tags, and you may be able to convert them into a version iTunes can use.

If no tag data exists, as is all-too-often the case with music obtained over the Internet, iTunes displays the file name in place of the title information and the other fields are blank. Enter the song information manually, as described earlier in this Chapter.

The ID3 Tag format has gone through a number of versions, and each is slightly different from its predecessors. iTunes can convert the data format between the different versions of ID3 when you select songs and choose Advanced Convert ID3 Tags. If you’re going to exchange MP3 files with Windows users, you should be aware that many of the Windows users are using MP3 player software that does not handle ID3 Version 2 tags well, and you may want to convert to an appropriate Version 1 variant.




Mac OS X Bible, Panther Edition
Mac OS X Bible, Panther Edition
ISBN: 0764543997
EAN: 2147483647
Year: 2003
Pages: 290

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