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 the music or video on them by using iTunes, too.
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) source of downloadable music and video content. (Whew!)
Figure 11-1. Dissecting the iTunes interface.
In a ...
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