The iPod & iTunes Pocket Guide, Second Edition

The iPod & iTunes Pocket Guide66

Rip a CD

Apple intended the process of converting audio-CD

music to computer data to be painless, and it is.

Here’s how to go about it:

1. Launch iTunes.

2. Insert an audio CD into your computer’s CD or

DVD drive.

By default, iTunes will try to identify the CD

you’ve inserted and log on to the Web to down-

load the CD’s track information—a very handy

feature for those who fi nd typing such minutia

to be tedious. The CD appears in iTunes’ Source

list under the Devices heading, and the track info

appears in the Song list to the right (Figure 3.1).

Figure 3.1 This

album’s song

tracks were

downloaded

from the Web

automatically

by iTunes.

3. iTunes then throws up a dialog box asking

whether you’d like to import the tracks from the

album into your iTunes library; click Yes and it

does, or click No and it doesn’t.

You can change this behavior in the Importing

tab within the Advanced iTunes Preferences

Chapter 3: iTunes and You 67

window. There, you fi nd an On CD Insert pop-up

menu. With the options in that menu, you can

direct iTunes to show the CD, begin playing it, ask

to import it (the default), import it, or import it

and then eject it.

4. If you decided earlier not to import the audio

but now would like to, simply select the CD in

the Source list and click the Import CD button in

the bottom-right corner of the iTunes window

(Figure 3.2).

To import only certain songs, uncheck the boxes

next to the songs you don’t want to import. Click

the Import CD button to import just those songs

that have a check mark next to them.

iTunes begins encoding the fi les via the method

chosen in the Importing tab of the Advanced

pane of the iTunes Preferences window (Figure

3.3). By default, iTunes imports songs in AAC

format at 128 Kbps.

Figure 3.3 The

Importing

panel of Tunes’

Advanced iPod

preferences

pane.

Figure 3.2

iTunes’ Import

CD button: Let

’er rip.

The iPod & iTunes Pocket Guide68

5. Click on Music in the Library section of the iTunes

Source list.

You’ll fi nd the songs you just imported some-

where in the song list.

6. To listen to a song, click its name in the list and

then click the Play button or press the spacebar.

MP3, MPEG-4, AAC, AIFF, WAV . . . is the computer industry inca-

pable of speaking plain English!?

It may seem so, given the plethora of acronyms fl oating through

modern-day Technotopia. But the lingo and the basics behind it

aren’t terribly diffi cult to understand.

MP3, AAC, AIFF, and WAV are audio fi le formats. The compres-

sion methods used to create MP3 and AAC fi les are termed lossy

because the encoder removes information from the original

sound fi le to create these smaller fi les. Fortunately, these encod-

ers are designed to remove the information you’re least likely to

miss—audio frequencies that you can’t hear easily, for example.

AIFF and WAV fi les are uncompressed, containing all the data

from the original. When a Macintosh pulls audio from an audio

CD, it does so in AIFF format, which is the native uncompressed

audio format used by Apple’s QuickTime technology. WAV is a

variant of AIFF and is used extensively with the Windows operat-

ing system.

continues on next page

Import Business: File Formats and Bit Rates