Mac OS® X Leopard™ For Dummies®

Chapter 11. The Musical Mac

In This Chapter

• Using iTunes

• Working with media

• Playing with playlists

• Backing up your iTunes media

A long time ago, before the iPod and the iTunes Store were born, iTunes was a program you used to store and manage your MP3 music files. Over the ensuing years, it has grown into much more. Today, iTunes not only manages your music collection, but manages your video collection as well. And if you use devices such as an iPod, Apple TV, or iPhone, you manage them using iTunes, too.

In fact, today iTunes does so much more than manage your tunes that I'm surprised Apple hasn't renamed it iMedia, iAV, or something like that.

So the anachronistically named iTunes is the program you use to manage audio and video files on your hard drive as well as your iPod, Apple TV, or iPhone devices.

Although entire books have been dedicated to iTunes alone, I share the most important stuff — the handful of things you really need to know — in this chapter.

Introducing iTunes

iTunes has to be the Swiss Army knife of multimedia software. After all, what other program lets you play audio CDs; create (burn) your own audio or MP3 CDs; listen to MP3, AIFF, AAC, WAV, and Audible.com files; view album cover art; enjoy pretty visual displays; view and manage TV shows, movies, and other video files; manage iPods (or other MP3 players), Apple TVs, and/or iPhones; listen to Internet radio stations; and more? On top of all that, it's your interface to the Apple iTunes Store, the world's leading (legitimate) ...