Lesson3.Playing Music on Your Mac (and Your iPod)

Lesson 3. Playing Music on Your Mac (and Your iPod)

Time	This lesson takes approximately 20 minutes to complete.
Goals	To import music into your Mac, download music from the Internet, and create a library of music. Then, organize your music into playlists and import this music into an Apple iPod MP3 player.

One of the coolest things about the Mac is how it handles music, especially when using your Mac with an Apple iPod MP3 player. The seamless way these two work together is just a beautiful thing to behold (and putting together and sorting your music collection is really a lot of fun. In fact, it's so much fun that compiling your library of songs can almost become a hobby of its own). The software we use to download, import, and organize music on a Mac is called iTunes. As powerful as iTunes is, it's amazingly easy to use, and having it sync with your iPod is even easier (the whole process is really pretty brilliant). iTunes lets you do three very important things: (1) It lets you import music from audio CDs (the same ones you buy at the record store in the mall); (2) it lets you buy and download music from the iTunes Music Store, which is the world's largest collection of legally downloadable music, with more than a million songs to choose from; and (3) it lets you organize all your music (no matter where it came from) into playlists that you create. Plus, if you have an iPod, a fourth iTunes feature appears, because when you connect an iPod to your Mac, iTunes copies your music playlists onto your iPod for you automatically. It all comes together to create one of the absolute most fun, most satisfying, and most exciting things about owning a Mac. Let's get to it!