iPod® and iTunes® for Dummies®, 7th Edition

Chapter 8. Bringing Content into iTunes

In This Chapter

• Setting your music importing preferences

• Ripping music from CDs and adding music files

• Subscribing to podcasts on Web sites

• Adding video files to your library

If iPods and iPhones were spaceships, iTunes would be the space station they dock with to get supplies. iTunes is the central repository of all content. You can bring your music from audio CDs into iTunes to preserve the music forever in digital format and play the music on your iPod, iPhone, or Apple TV without having to fumble for discs. You can import sound and video files downloaded from the Internet into iTunes to keep all your content organized and to take it with you in your iPod or iPhone.

In this chapter, I show you not only how to import music from audio CDs, but also how to import music, videos, and podcasts from Web sites into your iTunes library.

Adding Music

Bringing music tracks from a CD into iTunes is called ripping a CD (audio programmers do have a sense of humor). Ripping, in technical terms, is extracting the song's digital information from an audio CD. In common terms, ripping includes compressing the song's digital information and encoding it in a particular sound file format (such as AAC or MP3, explained later in this chapter).

How easy is it to rip a CD? Pop an audio CD into your CD-ROM/DVD drive, and unless you've changed your preferences (as described in the following section), you'll see the message in Figure 8-1. Click the Yes button to rip your CD ...