Joshua Zimmerman

If you don't know what iTunes is, then you may be living under a rock. iTunes is Apple's all around music/ mp3/ streaming audio/ online music store program that has made headlines around the world for its super easyness and online store. There is both a Mac version and a Windows version, and it can be run in Mac OS 9 and X. In this guide I will show you have to do rip/burn/mix, buy things online, and maybe show you a few features that you've never seen before.

Setting Up iTunes

The first time you open iTunes, it will ask you a whole host of questions. If you honestly don't care about any of, don't change it. Seriously, nothing really matters unless you think it does. The standard settings are fine for the average person. I personally changed only one thing, and that is the option to have iTunes organize the music for me. I don't like the way it organizes things, but thats me, and I share my music with a lot of people.

Turing a CD into mp3s

One of the most handy features of iTunes for a college person is the ability to move all your CDs onto your computer, and then leave your CDs at home. Depending on how big your collection is, you may have to spend a good deal of time doing this. To do this we turn a regular audio CD, which takes up a lot of Hard Drive space, into smaller files called mp3s, which are much much smaller.

First off you need to open iTunes, which would be in your Applications folder on your Hard Drive. If for some random reason you DON'T have it you can download it for free off Apple's webpage. Also, iTunes is up to version 4.0, if you have a lower version you may wish to update it using Software Update, which is also free.

Next stick in a music CD. Really, just any old music CD that you bought out of a store (burned CDs may or may not do everything I'm going to talk about). Now if you have an active internet connection iTunes will connect to a Music Database and get all the album and track informtion for you (as seen above). When its done doing this you should see all the track names, and a whole host of other information. Now you can play the CD through iTunes, but what we want to do is turn those tracks into mp3s. Just click on the Import button in the top right hand corner and iTunes will import and convert the tracks into mp3s. Depending on how fast your computer is it could take anywhere from five minutes to half an hour. Most computers bought in the last two or three years should do this quite quickly. When the process is done, click on your Library and play your new mp3s.

Organize Your Library

Now if for some reason your track infromation was wrong for certain songs, or if you don't have an internet connection you'll want to change that information. This is very easy to do and comes in handy when you want to organize your music by genre or add other options. First off you'll want to click on your Library. Navigate down till you find the song or songs you wish to change. If you'd like to change more than one song, highlight them all, or just the one you wish change. Now you can either right click on the song and go to Get Info or go up to File and down to Get Info. This should bring up a new window with all the current information about the song. To change this info just click on the Info tab. You should now see a large number of fields in which should be the current song info. Just change it to what you want it to be and than click on the Ok button. You've now changed that song info. Spiffy.

Make Playlists and Burn CDs

Now that you have your enture music collection in iTunes you may want to make your own custom Playlists or burn a CD off for your next ride home. This is made extreamly easy under iTunes. To make a playlist you can either click on the + button in the buttom left hand corner or go up to File and down to New Playlist. This will create a new Playlist that will be shown under your library. Give it a name or something. Now to put music into this Playlist just click on your Library and drag the msuic you want into the list. Once your done, just click back on the playlist and start playing your new mix.

Now if you'd like to burn this Playlist into a CD you only need to do one or two things. The first is to be sure that you have a CD burner on your computer, or else you may run into a problem. Second is to check to see how long your Playlist is. You don't want it to be longer than the blank CD that you have, and it would be wise to leave a minute or two of freetime available so that iTunes can put a second or two of empty space between tracks. Now to burn you just need to click on the Burn button in the top right corner (where the Rip button was). If you click it once it will open into a radiactive throbbing button and your CD tray will open up. Put your blank CD in and then iTunes will change your mp3s back into an audio CD that you can play in any CD player.

If you have an mp3 playing CD Player you can burn your CD as an mp3 CD, but you'll need to change the burning setup in the Preferences.

Sharing Your Music Over a Network

Apple does not allow for the ability to file swap mp3s with iTunes. But there is the next best thing. By going into your Preferences and then over to the Sharing tab you can set several option for looking for and sharing your music over a network. The option that everyone probably wants turned on it the Look for Shared Music which lets you see and play music off other people's music on yoru local network. If someone is sharing music over your network you will see it under your Libary icon on the lefthand side of iTunes. If you want to share your music, select other options to your heart contents.

WARNING: If you're using a laptop or are actually worried about people streaming music off of your computer, don't share your music. It can slow things down if you're a high end gamer, or have a slow computer.

Music Store

I first started writting this guide 7 months ago, and got sidetracked. But in that time Apple has released a new online Music store that lets you buy any musical track for 99 cents, or most albums for $10. Not a bad deal, seeing how you can then burn these tracks onto a CD or put them on your iPod. To date I've bought two albums, and have been very happy with the quality.

To access the iTunes Music Store you need to make sure you have the latest version of iTunes. Just run Software Update to see if there are new versions. The store appears below your library and above yoru playlists. (If for some reason you have the latest version, and the store is not there, go into your Preferences and click on the Store tab to make sure the Show iTunes Music Store option is checked.)

Within the store you can search for music and preview 30 seconds of a track before paying for music. Its rather simple. The tough part of deciding what music you want and finding the mooney to pay for it. When you do download music a new Playlist will be there called Purchased Music and it will show all the music you've downloaded. This music will also be in your main Library.

Limits to bought music: You can only burn onto CD the same playlist of purchased music 10 times. You may 'authorize' up to three computers to play the music. AKA, you put in your account info into other computers at home and they can use those tracks. The downloaded music only works on iPods.

How to get around all of this: Burn your newly bought album onto a CD. Import this music back onto your computer as mp3 files. Now you have a copy with no limits to it.

Problems: I once bought music while on a bad connection and one of the tracks didn't download. Now to fix this problem go to the menu Advanced and down to Check for Purchased Music. This seeing if all the tracks you bought are on your computer, and if not, it downloads them for you.

In closing....

So thats the basics of iTunes. A lot more of the program is very strait forward, and trying to list all the functions and features would take a long time (like if you click on the green minimize and mazimize button, you get a mini-itunes controler, or that the little flower button starts up the visulaizer). Just play around with it a bit and have fun. Put all your music into iTunes and forget about taking all those CDs with you to college.

-Joshua