Section 17.4. Importing iTunes Music | iLife 05: The Missing Manual

17.4. Importing iTunes Music

Nothing adds emotional impact to a piece of video like music. Slow, romantic music makes the difference between a sad story and one that actually makes viewers cry. Fast, driving music makes viewers ' hearts beat fasterscientists have proven it. Music is so integral to movies these days that, as you walk out of the theater, you may not even be aware that a movie had music, but virtually every movie does, and you were emotionally manipulated by it.

Home movies are no exception. Music adds a new dimension to your movie, so much so that some iMovie fans edit to music . They choose a song, lay it down in the audio track, and then cut the video footage to fit the beats, words, or sections of the music.

Tip: Even if you don't synchronize your video to the music in this way, you might still want to experiment with a music-only soundtrack. That is, turn off the camcorder sound, so that your movie is silent except for the music. The effect is haunting , powerful, and often used in Hollywood movies during montage sequences.

If you've been using the free iTunes jukebox software to manage your music collection, you're in for a real treat. iMovie is well integrated with the other programs in its iLife software suiteincluding iTunes. You can view, and even play, your entire music library, complete with its individual playlists, right in iMovie, making it easy to choose just the right piece of music to accompany your video.

(If you've created homemade songs in GarageBand, this feature is your ticket to importing them into iMovie, too. They show up in the iTunes playlist named after you.)

Tip: You can use iTunes to build a music library by converting the songs on your audio CDs into MP3 files on your hard drive, by buying individual pop songs from the iTunes Music Store, or by importing digital audio files you found on the Internet. See iPod & iTunes: The Missing Manual for complete instructions.

Here's how you go about choosing an iTunes track for your movie:

Click the Audio button, if necessary (Figure 17-3) .

The panel changes to reveal your iTunes music collection. (If you don't see your list of songs, choose iTunes Library from the pop-up menu above the panel.)

Find just the right song .

The panel is filled with useful controls to help you find the right music. For example, if you've organized your iTunes music into playlists ( subsets ), you can use the pop-up menu above the list to choose the playlists you want to look over. (All other songs are temporarily hidden.) You can also use the Search box at the bottom of the list, as shown in Figure 17-4.

Figure 17-4. Left: Choose any of your playlists to navigate your massive music collection.
Right: You can also click in the Search box. As you type a song or performer's name , iMovie hides all songs whose names don't match, so that you can quickly home in on a certain song or group of songs from among thousands. (To restore the entire list and delete what you've typed, click the little X button at the right end of the Search box.)

To listen to a song, click its name and then click the round Play button beneath the list. Or, if you think life is too short already, just double-click a song name. (To interrupt playback, either double-click a different song, double-click the same one, or click the round Play triangle button to turn it gray once again.)

Place the music into one of your audio tracks .

You can go about this in either of two ways. If the Playhead is already parked where you want the music to begin (you can take this opportunity to move it, if you like), just click the song name and then click the Place at Playhead button beneath the song list. iMovie takes a moment to deposit the entire song, beginning at the point you've indicated.

You can also drag the song name directly out of the list and down into the Timeline Viewer. As long as you don't release the mouse button, and as long as the cursor is in one of the two audio tracks, you'll see that you can simultaneously move the Playhead and position the beginning of the song at just the right spot. Release the mouse when the song looks like it's in the right place.

(On the other hand, you can always adjust the starting point of the music after you've placed it, by dragging its audio-clip stripe horizontally.)

Depending on the length of the song you've selected, the importing process can take 30 seconds or more. That's how long it takes for iMovie to copy the iTunes track into a new audio file (in your project's Media folder). When it's complete, a new colored bar appears in the audio track, labeled with the song name.

Try dragging the Playhead back to the beginning of the music bar and pressing the Space bar to play it. If it doesn't have quite the effect you thought it would, click the newly placed music's bar and then press the Delete key, to make room for your next experiment.