Music is an important part of the digital lifestyle. From listening to tunes while you work or play to creating customized audio tracks for your iMovie movies, music adds tremendously to your Mac life. In addition to the simple act of listening to music, the Mac enables you to customize your music in almost every respect.
iTunes is Mac OS X's amazing digital music application that enables you to truly master your music. For example, you can do the following:
Listen to audio CDs
Store and listen to all your music on your Mac so it is only a click away
Convert music into a variety of formats
Browse and purchase music using the Apple Music Store
Customize music playback
Create and manage custom playlists
Create custom audio CDs
Manage music on a portable music player, the best of which is Apple's iPod
Share your music on a network
Listen to audio streams from the Internet
NOTE
By default, iTunes is installed when you install Mac OS X. If iTunes isn't installed on your Mac, you can download a copy from www.apple.com/itunes/.
NOTE
You can also use iTunes to listen to audio books and other content from Audible.com. This service offers many audio books you can load into iTunes and listen to or transfer to a music player to take with you. Explaining how to work with Audible content is beyond the scope of this chapter. To learn about this, visit www.apple.com/itunes/audiobooks.html.