iLife '04: The Missing Manual

Chapter 2. Getting Music Out of iTunes

The first chapter of this section is all about getting music into iTunes, whether from a CD or by dragging audio files onto your hard drive. Now comes the payoff: the chance to hear and even see your songs playing, to burn them onto a CD, or to share them with friends and family over a network.

Playing Music

To turn your computer into a jukebox, click the triangular Play button in the upper-left corner of the iTunes window, or press the Space bar. The computer immediately begins to play the songs whose names have checkmarks in the main list. (You can also double-click a song’s name to make it start playing.)

The central display at the top of the window shows not only the name of the song and album, but also where you are in the song, as represented by the diamond in the horizontal strip. Drag this diamond, or click elsewhere in the strip, to jump around in the song.

Or just click the tiny triangle at the left side of this display to see a pulsing VU meter, indicating the current music’s sound levels at various frequencies.

Tip

You can also control CD playback from the Mac’s Dock. Just Control-click the iTunes icon (or click and hold on it) to produce a pop-up menu offering playback commands like Pause, Next Song, and Previous Song, along with a display that identifies the song currently being played.

As music plays, you can control and manipulate the music and the visuals of your Mac in all kinds of interesting ways. As a result, some people don’t ...