I Tunes2 FAQ A

iTunes 2 FAQ Overview Q. What are the benefits of digitizing and organizing my music collection on my computer? A. Just as the popularity of compact disc technology revolutionized the way that songs were stored and enjoyed through the ’80s and ’90s, the personal computer is fast becoming a favorite new choice for collecting and experiencing music today. Building a personal digital music library on your computer allows you to store hundreds of CDs in one convenient place, using a high-quality and efficient compression format called MP3. An application like iTunes gives you instant access to all your music, so you don’t have to search through stacks of CDs to find a specific song. And unlike CDs, which store only a song’s track number, MP3s generated by iTunes automatically contain detailed information, including the song name, artist, album, genre, year recorded, and more. Music stored on your computer’s hard drive provides a level of flexibility that has never before existed. In a few seconds, you can easily create playlists of your favorite music in the order that you want to hear it, allowing you to mix and match songs from different artists and albums. Playlists can be saved, rearranged, and revisited as often as you like, and can be transferred to a portable MP3 player or burned on a CD for tunes to go. Q. How do I “rip” music from my CDs onto my hard drive? A. Music on audio CDs is stored in an uncompressed digital format that retains full recording quality. Using iTunes, you can convert, or “rip,” tracks into the MP3 format, which compresses the size of the file for more efficient storage. To rip files in iTunes, simply insert a music CD into your CD drive and iTunes automatically looks up the album on an Internet database to retrieve artist, album, and track information. The songs will appear in your iTunes window, and you can select which ones you want to convert to MP3 and click Import. iTunes encodes those tracks into MP3 format and automatically adds them to your music library.1 Q. What is MP3? A. MP3 is short for Moving Picture Experts Group Audio Layer 3. It is the best-known of the digital audio formats and has been adopted by Internet users as the de facto standard for compressed music. The files can be compressed at different rates, but the less they are compressed, the better they sound. The default compression setting for iTunes is 160 kilobits per second (Kbps), which yields extremely high-fidelity music but is still compact enough to fit many songs onto most portable…