Exploring iTunes

Understanding Music on the Mac

Music is an important part of the digital lifestyle. From listening to tunes while you work or play to creating customized audio tracks for your iMovie movies, music adds tremendously to your Mac life. In addition to the simple act of listening to music, the Mac enables you to customize your music in almost every respect.

iTunes is Mac OS X's amazing digital music application that enables you to truly master your music. For example, you can do the following:

• Listen to audio CDs

• Store and listen to all your music on your Mac so it is only a click away

• Convert music into a variety of formats

• Browse and purchase music using the Apple Music Store

• Customize music playback

• Create and manage custom playlists

• Create custom audio CDs

• Manage music on a portable music player, the best of which is Apple's iPod

• Share your music on a network

• Listen to audio streams from the Internet

NOTE

By default, iTunes is installed when you install Mac OS X. If iTunes isn't installed on your Mac, you can download a copy from www.apple.com/itunes/.

NOTE

You can also use iTunes to listen to audio books and other content from Audible.com. This service offers many audio books you can load into iTunes and listen to or transfer to a music player to take with you. Explaining how to work with Audible content is beyond the scope of this chapter. To learn about this, visit www.apple.com/itunes/audiobooks.html.