OS X Mavericks For Dummies

12

The Musical Mac

In This Chapter

Using iTunes

Working with media

Playing with playlists

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 manages not only your music collection but also your video collection. And if you use devices such as an iPod, Apple TV, iPad, 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 and to manage syncing files with your iPod, Apple TV, iPhone, and iPad 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 is 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, Audible.com, and several other types of files; ...