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NZ Macguide Issue 9
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Getting track names from the Online CD Database |
For many year now, Macs have come equipped with CD drives. It's always been pretty easy to pop in a music CD, press a button and listen to your music.iTunes, though, has not only made this a lot easier, but it's also added all kinds of sophisticated features. I heard a sad tale the other day of someone who typed in information for all the tracks on several hundred CDs. If only they'd known that they should have connected to the Internet before putting their CD in the drive! If they done that, iTunes would have filled in that information automatically for them. So let's settle back, listen to a little music and find out more about iTunes.
Import some music
iTunes should automatically open up when you put the CD in the CD drive. If it doesn't for some reason, you need to find it in your Applications folder and open it up.
While iTunes can simply play your CDs, it can be more useful sometimes to 'import' the music from the CDs to your computer's hard drive. That way you can build up a library of music tracks. Later on, when you want to listen to some music, you can just choose which tracks you want to hear and play them in any order you like, or even possibly produce a compilation CD for yourself.
When you import a CD it's not going to be very useful if the tracks just end up called 'track one', 'track two', 'track three' etc. It's much more useful if they have real names, with the title of the song, the name of the album, and the name of the artist.
While you can type these in yourself (click on a track in the iTunes window and choose File - get Info) that's kind of time consuming and boring - and there's an easier way to do it. The trick is, make sure you connect to the Internet before you put the CD in the drive. Now when you insert the CD iTunes will automatically go online and look up the relevant information.
I inserted the EcoNation CD and after a few moments all the information was loaded for me. Now I can actually import the tracks I want. Notice how all the tracks have a check mark beside them to the left? If there's a track I don't want, I can simply remove the check mark and that track won't be imported.
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iTunes is importing this track at over seven times the playing speed |
Now, making sure I have the CD selected in the list on the left I go to the top right hand corner of the window and click the Import button. Depending on how you have your Preferences set you'll either hear all the tracks on the CD while they are imported, or iTunes will 'rip' them at high speed and convert the whole CD to MP3 tracks.
Go ahead and check your email or write some letters or whatever - you don't have to sit and watch iTunes while it imports the music. You can safely eject the CD once it's been imported and store it in a cupboard somewhere. From now on, you can use your computer to play the music you have purchased.
Play the music
Now you might be wondering where those tracks have gone, how to access them and how to play just the tracks from that CD. This isn't a problem if you've imported only one CD, but if you've imported several then iTunes is probably showing you the entire Library.
Of course there are number of ways to work with iTunes. Here's one: to the left of the Browse button there is a Search area. Click in that area and type something like the title of the CD. In my case I typed the words "eco nation".
This quickly brought me to a list of all the Eco Nation tracks in my whole iTunes library. At the bottom of the window iTunes shows me how many songs there are all together, how long it would take to play them all, and how much hard drive space has been used up.
Now I can just double click one of those tracks to start playing it and when that track is finished the next one will start. But what say I want to play all those tracks again another time? What I can do it is make a playlist of songs I want to hear. I can either do this manually, or I can use iTunes' smart play list feature. Smart play lists are really what they are called: Smart.
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'Dumb' and 'Smart' Playlists |
Dumb Playlist
To make a 'dumb' play list, I need to select particular tracks in my Library. On the left of the iTunes window you'll see a column called Source. Just drag all of the selected songs at once to a blank area in the Source column and iTunes will create a playlist. If the tracks are from various CDs, the playlist will be called 'Untitled'. You just need to start typing to enter a better name. If the tracks you selected are all from one CD, iTunes will give it the name of the CD. In future you can just click on that playlist when you want to play that music.
That play list has its disadvantages though. If I buy more CDs like this, I'll have to manually add those songs to my play list. There is a smarter way to do it: I can create a 'smart' play list.
Notice that this Eco_Nation playlist has an icon of a musical note. iTunes already has some other playlists, but their icons are of a cog. The musical note is a manual playlist, while the ones with a cog are Smart.
Smart Playlist
A smart play list is one that you an set up to automatically adapt itself to your changing library of music. Notice, for example, that Eco Nation's CD is world music. I might like to compile a play list which is only of world music. And I might like that play list to just update itself when I import more world music CDs. This is what a Smart play list does.
Go to the File menu and choose New smart play list. In this window there are two tabs: Simple and Advanced. You might find that Simple is all you need but for my purposes I need the Advanced tab. Once I click on Advanced I find that I can set up a fairly comprehensive search.
It's important that I make sure to tick the Live Updating check box. Other than that I need to check Match the following condition and then from the popup boxes I can choose how my smart play list should behave. I want a smart play list which automatically notices any World music that I might import so I click on the left-hand pop-up and choose Genre. I'm happy with the word "contains" but I could choose something else like 'doesn't contain' or 'is' or 'is not' if that would be better for me. In the text box on the right I enter: World.
You have some controls here to limit the number of songs and whether to play in order or randomly - you can choose what you like there. Once I'm done I click the OK button.
Now in the list on the left I can see a new play list called World. It has the cog icon for a smart play list. Any music in my Library which belongs to the World genre will be added to that playlist automatically.
If I click on that playlist it will now show me all the tracks in my Library which are labelled as being World music.
Delete Music
Somehow I've ended up with two copies of "Mash'd Mx". I don't need both so I want to delete one. In order to do this I need to be clear about the difference between my Library and my Playlists.
The Library is the respository of all the music (or spoken word) I import. If I try to delete an item from my library then iTunes will warn me that this will remove that track from my computer. If I go ahead then that track will be gone.
A Playlist though is simply a list of tracks. Imagine you're a radio station. Each day you get a piece of paper and write a list of all the music you'll play on your show. The actual CDs are stored in the Library. You can happily cross items off the playlist or add them in and the Library remains unchanged. If you go to the Library and remove a CD from the building then you won't be able to play that CD again.
If you delete an item from your iTunes playlist then you're just indicating you don't want to listen to it. It doesn't remove the track from the computer.
Since I have two copies of "Mash'd Mx" in my playlist I can happily remove one of them. If this were a "Dumb" playlist it would imply I had added it twice. Since it's a Smart playlist though it suggests I actually have imported this track twice: I have two copies in my Library.
First I select the Library. Then I search for Mash'd Mx. Now I select the track I don't want and press the Delete key. First I see a warning about removing items from the list. I OK that. Now I see a warning about moving the files to the Trash. Yes, I'm sure - I have two copies and need only one. OK.
There's plenty more you can do with iTunes - look in the menus for the fancy visual effects, for example, or slot in a blank CD and notice the Burn button becomes active so you could create your own music CDs.
Most of all though have a look at the Help menu where there's a vast amount of information in easy chunks.
© Parkside Media 2003
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