8.5. CD Music If you don't use iTunes to organize your music, you can also snag a track or two directly from an audio CD. You just insert your favorite music CD (Carly Simon, Rolling Stones, the Cleveland Orchestra, or whatever), choose the track you want to swipe, and the deed is done. Here's the procedure: -
Open the Audio panel, if it isn't already open . Do so by clicking the Audio button shown in Figure 8-3. -
Insert the music CD into your Mac. After a moment, a list of songs on the CD appears in the list (Figure 8-5).  | Figure 1-5. The list in the Audio palette identifies the different songs (tracks) on your CD, along with the play length of each one. You can sort the list, audition different songs, or search the list just as you do your iTunes library (Figure 8-4). Drag an entire song into your movie, or click Place at Playhead.
Clicking that little triangle button at upper right, by the way, ejects the CD. | | At first, they're probably called Track 1, Track 2, and so on. Unfortunately, audio CDs were invented before the advent of computers that could read them, and so the text of their track names isn't stored on the disc. Clearly, it would be a lot easier to find the music you want if you could see the actual names of the songs on the CD. That's why, after a moment, iMovie automatically begins to download the list of songs on your CD, assuming that you're online. (iTunes may also open automatically, depending on how you've set up the CDs & DVDs panel in System Preferences.) Behind the scenes, it's consulting the Gracenote Internet CD databasea worldwide repository of track and album information. After a few moments, switch back into iMovie. You'll see that both the track names and the name of the album have now been typed in for you. You'll also notice that the pop-up menu above the Audio palette has changed to identify the name of the album. -
Find the song you want. To do so, double-click one of the songs in the scrolling list (or click a song and then click the Play triangle button below the list). Click the Play triangle again to stop the music. Unfortunately, there's no way to fast-forward. -
Insert the song into one of your audio tracks. You can use either of the techniques identified in the previous step 3 (page 223). Either click the Place at Playhead button beneath the song list, or drag the song name out of the list and into position on one of your audio tracks. A progress bar appears as iMovie copies the song file off the CD and into your project's Media folder. When it's finished, you'll see a new colored bar in your audio track representing the imported song and bearing its name. When you're finished importing music, you're free to eject the CD (by holding down the Eject button on your keyboard, for example), insert another one, and nab another selection of music. iMovie no longer requires the first CD. |
