iLife '04: The Missing Manual

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:

1. Open the Audio panel, if it isn’t already open.

   Do so by clicking the Audio button shown in Figure 17-3.

2. Insert the music CD into your Mac.

   After a moment, a list of songs on the CD shows up in the list (Figure 17-4).

   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 database—a 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.

   

   Figure 17-4. The list in the Audio palette ...