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 QuickTime 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.

The software you can use to make beautiful music is Apple's iTunes. This software enables you to truly master your music. For example, you can do the following:

• Listen to audio CDs

• Listen to MP3 music

• Listen to music in other formats

• Convert music to the MP3 format

• Create and manage custom playlists

• Create custom audio CDs

• Download music to a portable MP3 player, the best of which is Apple's iPod

• Listen to Internet radio

• Listen to other 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 an MP3 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.