Grabbing Music from an Audio CD

Nearly every kind of filmed creation studio pictures, homemade shorts, even television commercials uses background music at some point. In addition to importing music from iTunes, iMovie includes the capability to extract songs from any music CD you put into your Mac and turn them into editable audio clips.

To extract a song from an audio CD:

1. Insert the audio CD into your Mac's CD or DVD drive.

2. Click the Audio button in iMovie to bring up the Audio pane. If a CD is present, its tracks appear in the pane.

3. Drag a song title from the Audio pane to the position in the Timeline where you want it to begin playing (Figure 10.21). iMovie normally uses track 2, but you can drag the song to either track.

   Figure 10.21. When you insert an audio CD into your Mac's media drive, the track list appears in iMovie. Simply drag a track name to the Timeline to copy it from the CD.

   

   The extracted track appears as an orange audio clip, and can be edited like other audio clips (Figure 10.22).

   Figure 10.22. Tracks added from a CD show up as orange audio clips.

   

Tip

• iMovie saves songs extracted from CDs as AIFF formatted files, which feature better quality but also occupy much more disk space. If you don't need that level of quality (for example, if you're creating a movie that will appear on the Web), you can save some disk space by importing the CD's tracks in iTunes and using an MP3 or AAC formatted song file.