Tag Archives: mp3s

Fix iTunes: How To Configure iTunes For The Best Audio Quality

Posted by on January 24, 2012 Comments Off

A word of advice I like to offer to folks just starting out with iTunes is before you rip and import your entire CD collection make sure you check which Audio File format is going to suit you best. You may not certainly want to import your music at the default audio compression setting that comes with iTunes because the quality is quite low and the music files are compressed a lot. iTunes is defaulted to AAC files at one of the lowest compression setting at 128 Kbps. Some folks may not really tell the difference between songs imported into iTunes as AAC 128 versus WAVs which are not compressed at all but most folks will be able to tell the difference because the difference is going to be like night and day. Listening to music files that are WAVs versus music files that are AAC 128 you will notice that the WAVs will sound a lot beefier versus the AAC 128′s will sound flatter and not having a lot of oomph!. What I end up doing is importing all or most of my music at MP3-320. Something in between. Keep in mind also that music imported at AAC 128s will be a lot smaller in size compared to WAV files and MP3-320s. So it all depends on how big of a hard drive you have dedicated to your iTunes.

What Audio File Format Is Best For You?

With iTunes you can rip/import your music in five different file formats. Those five file formats are MP3, AAC, Apple Lossless, WAV and AIF. WAVs and AIFs are audio file formats that are not compressed. In other words if you want to import audio into your iTunes and want the music to sound just like the CDs then you would use AIF or WAV. Expect to fill up your hard drives pretty quickly though. For the sound quality you will lose your hard drive space. The other three file formats – MP3s, AACs and Apple Lossless are compressed file formats. As mentioned above I use MP3-320 and I’m pretty happy with the sound quality versus file size. Even though it’s twice the size of an MP3 at 128 KBPS I enjoy and hear more on 320 KBPS than I would on the 128. So it takes some importing and changing file formats around to decide what you like the best and what sounds the best for you in iTunes. After you’ve made the decision just stick to one file format to make things easy and consistent to import and build up your iTunes music library.

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Unfortunately iTunes does not handle WMA files or FLAC files at this time. Who knows they might add it at a later time but currently the five mentioned file formats are what you can rip and import your music at currently into iTunes.

I’ve found that MP3s are cross platform and stick to using them to rip and import my CDs or music. If I’m sending files back and forth and use a file format like WMA or FLAC I might run into difficulties with folks who don’t know what they are or even have a software program to play them or import them into their computer or iTunes. So I tend to stick to MP3s import at 320 KBPS as they work best for me.

To change your audio import setting simply go to iTunes > Preferences and select Import Settings. See pictures below.

Once you select Import Settings from here you can select the different Audio ripping/importing options available. See pictures below. From here you can select which file format you want to import your music, what bit rate KBPS you want to import your MP3s and so on.

What Audio File Format Works Best For The iPod, iPhone and iPad

The other thing worth considering when selecting which audio file format works best for your iTunes library is your iPhone, iPod and iPad. Your iDevices have limited amount of space so when you are ripping/importing your entire CD collection into iTunes think about how much music you want to take with you on your iPod or iPhone or iPad. Because those devices have limited amount of space and if you are ripping your iTunes library at a very high bit rate for example the MP3-320′s I mentioned above then you are going to fill up your devices a lot quicker because those MP3s are larger than the normal MP3s (MP3-192) that folks use or the default AAC 128 that comes with your iTunes. If you have an iPhone 16GB you might want to consider importing your music at a lower bit rate if you want to be able to take a nice chunk of music along with you. But if you have an iPod 160 like me I do import all my music at MP3-320 so I can still take a nice collection of music with me and they are all sounding excellent as well as they are imported at MP3-320.

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What You Can Do With iTunes

Posted by on December 23, 2011 Comments Off

Apple’s iTunes program is a music and media library/media (music, movies, videos, podcasts, books, apps) management/organizer program and not only works on the Apple Macintosh computer system but also on Windows computers. iTunes allows you to manage your entire CD and music collection allowing you to import all your CDs or digital music files, create playlists, listen to music and sync your music to your iDevices such as iPhone, iPad or iPod Touch or more.

Without a doubt Apple’s iTunes along with the iPod and iPhone, has transformed the way we buy and listen to music today. Most of you are familiar with iTunes but a few of you might not be familiar with iTunes yet or some of you might need a bit more info about what iTunes can do then read on as you will find out how iTunes can change the way you buy and listen to music from now on.

iTunes comes with any Apple Macintosh computer you would have purchased or can also be downloaded or updated on any of your Apple Macintosh Computers from here. iTunes can also be downloaded and installed on any Windows computers from here.

Hands down Apple’s iTunes along with the iPod and iPhone are the best thing to happen to music since the first days of recording and putting music on a physical device to listen to. iTunes allows you do things with your music that you only would have fantasized about doing with them 15 or 20 years ago and we’re not just talking about you popping a CD in and playing it and listening to the songs on the CD. iTunes does a whole lot more than just playing the music off your CDs.

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What Can You Do With iTunes?

There are a ton of things you can do with iTunes but we’ll certainly only cover music here but we might mention video or other uses for iTunes here and there but mostly this article is about using iTunes to listen and organize music.

 

- Listen to CDs while playing in iTunes

- Import CDs as MP3s, AACs, Apple Lossless, AIFs or WAVs (for more info about file formats read this article)

- Store the imported music in iTunes so you don’t have to deal with stacks of CDs ever again

- Backup all the imported CDs and music as DATA DVDs for safekeeping

- Search for your favorite music (artists, albums, compilations, greatest hits, singles) and organize your music so you keep going back to your favorite songs to hear

- Create playlists of your favorite songs/music which include your favorite songs or all songs from your favorite bands or all songs within a theme

- Create custom playlists of your favorite artists, genres, songs released in a specific year or by rating so you can come back to those songs easily and listen to them over and over again

- Sync your favorite songs, playlists, smart playlists, artists, albums or genres to your iPhone, iPod or iPad and take it with you

- Create CD length playlists and burn CDs of those mixes for friends, family or take with you for your car or trip

- Turn on Sharing and share your entire library over a network or share a specific playlist/playlists with folks on the same network

- Crossfade Songs so your iTunes music flows seamlessly from one to another. Like your own personal music DJ (see picture below)

- Use the equalizer in iTunes to boost your audio sound output quality to your liking (see picture below)

- Purchase and download music from the iTunes Music Store

- Download and listen to free Podcasts available at the iTunes Store or elsewhere

- Stream 100s of free Radio Stations playing the coolest new and classic music

- Stream your iTunes music library with Apple TV to enjoy your music

- Create ringtones of your favorite music for your iPhone or other other smartphone or cell phone

So that’s a pretty good start with what you can do with iTunes but there are certainly more things that you can do with iTunes. With so much to do it’s time to import all your music into iTunes if you haven’t yet and finally enjoy all your music digitally anywhere at anytime. Best part about it is when you have all your CDs or any music that was in your music collection imported into iTunes you’ll never have to pull the CDs out again all you do is launch your iTunes, type the name of the band, album or any keyword related to your music and your options will show up and you can be on your way to enjoying your music quickly and efficiently. Put all those CDs in storage and leave them there!!

Also make sure you back up your entire iTunes music library in case you have a computer crash or anything happen to the music on your hard drive and if anything does happen to your music on your computer and you lose your music files then you will have the backup to pull from and you don’t have to reimport all those CDs again one by one. Backup the music on DVD-R’s so you can store 4.2GB of music which usually is approximately 6 CDs.

So that is it. Look for more articles in the future about iTunes and how to best manage your iTunes to enjoy your music as best as possible. Enjoy your iTunes!!


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Installing And Setting Up iTunes On A Windows PC

Posted by on December 11, 2011 Comments Off

If you are on a Mac computer most likely you have iTunes installed but Windows computers do not come with iTunes installed.

First thing on a Windows machine is that you have to make sure you are logged into your computer as an administrator login. All applications or programs should be quit or not running. So nothing should be running during our install of the iTunes software. The best music player on a computer, hand down.

1. Go to www.apple.com/itunes and click on the Free Download with arrow pointing down button (see picture below – click to enlarge) so you can start your download process. You will have to enter your email address to actually have the download start but it’s pretty simple. Just follow the instructions on downloading iTunes – you are looking for iTunesSetup.exe file. You must pick the hard drive location where your iTunesSetup.exe file is downloading and make sure you remember where it’s downloading.

2. Next you should run the iTunesSetup.exe file that was downloaded. This is what’s going to install your iTunes on your Windows computer. Once you see the welcome screen just click through to the agreement that you you have to digitally sign. This is typical of all software you download it’s the same legal mumbo jumbo so just click through and make sure to accept it because if you do not accept this you will not be able to finish installing iTunes on your Windows computer.

3. After you have accepted the license agreement with Apple you will have to choose your installation options. Those installation options are as follows.

Installation Option 1:

Add iTunes and QuickTime Shortcuts To My Desktop. This basically installs the shortcuts for iTunes music player and QuickTime Player on your Windows computers desktop so that you can simply find the applications rather than dig for them.

Installation Option 2:

Use iTunes as the Default Player for Audio Files. This is important and I highly recommend that you set iTunes as your default music and audio file player. It’s the most popular player of it’s kind out there and I highly recommend you stick to one player. If you are happy with the player you currently use then by all means stick to it but if you don’t want any confusion or complications to arise then stick to one and if you need to use iTunes then stick to iTunes as your one and only music player. Trust me you’ll appreciate that you did that.

Installation Option 3:

Automatically update iTunes and other Apple software. I suggest you select this so that your computer updates your iTunes music player automatically so when there is a new update then you have the latest version of iTunes. It’s always good to have the latest and greatest version of any software program to be able to do what the latest things the software is doing.

4. Choosing the default language of the iTunes library. It’s defaulted to English but you are ok to choose any of the other available languages. One simple click on the drop down menu and you should be able to select what you want to use as the language.

5. You should now choose the destination folder for your brand new installed iTunes music player program. It’s defaulted to the Program Files folder on your C drive but if you wanted to use another folder just select the Change button to use to locate the desired destination folder.

6. Finally click Install to finish the installation process for installing your iTunes on your Windows computer. Once finished you will see the Completed dialog box on your desktop.

Finally iTunes along with QuickTime are both freshly installed on your Windows PC. You can start using iTunes by double clicking the iTunes on your desktop with the shortcut that we set up earlier. You can also just click the Start menu to locate iTunes and launch it.

I know this is repetitive but Apple has you agree to these agreements so once you launch iTunes for the first time you will have to agree to the license agreement again but once you do you are on your way to enjoy listening to music on your new iTunes music player/library program. But prior to that you have one more step and that is the iTunes Set Up assistant and just click through, Next button and really you will be on your way to enjoying the best music player around. Don’t have too much fun!!

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A Simple Way to Create A Playlist In Your iTunes

Posted by on November 8, 2011 Comments Off

A Simple Way to Create a Playlist In Your iTunes

The idea of creating a group of songs started when music was first introduced. It also started with mixtapes which most of the older folks that lived through the 70s, 80s and early 90s are aware of. CDs also existed after mixtapes which is a newer version of grouped songs. When the Internet was introduced to the public, playlists became a big hit to music lovers. iTunes is one of the most popular playlists creators today and it is used by hundreds of thousands of folks worldwide. Actually, there are many more features in iTunes aside from creating custom playlist mixes. You can burn CDs and make mix CDs such as Christmas mixes during the holidays, synchronize multiple iPods/iPhones and iPads on a single computer and take them along with you to your next party, provide you with a whole new experience in song combinations and help optimize the storage space of devices that has low capacity.

Creating a playlist in iTunes is not a complicated thing to do as long as you know how to use iTunes then you will have a very easy time in creating playlists. To start off, you will have to launch your iTunes music library on your computer and look for the + icon. It is located on the bottom left of the window. See the picture below.

After that, a new playlist will appear on the left side. This new playlist does not have a name yet and it does not contain any songs or tracks from your iTunes music library. But you can start adding songs from your library in a bit. Here are the next things that you should do to finish creating a playlist with your favorite songs.

First, name your playlist. Double click the name and start typing your desired new playlist name. After that, simply click enter and the name of the playlist will be changed. If you forgot to put a name on it, the playlist will simply be named Untitled Playlist. If you are not convinced on the name that you came up with, you can still change it later as these names are not permanent. Double click the name again and put the new name that you want. When you first clicked on the plus sign you will see that you can alter the Untitled Playlist name to your desired playlist name immediately.

Second, you now have to add songs to your playlist. After naming your playlist, the next step will be to add songs. Adding songs is as simply as dragging and dropping items on your playlist. You do not have to click a lot of buttons just to add a single song. What I would do is to double click on the new playlist that you created and make your playlist window free standing. See image below.

Click on the Music tab located at the upper left hand of the playlist.

You can find songs there that you can place on your playlist. After you find the songs that you want, just click the song and drag it to you playlist. When you see that the playlist has turned blue, just let go of your mouse and the song will automatically be added. Just repeat the process until you finish getting the songs that you want in your new playlist and the desired mix of songs has been completed.

Third, rearrange and order all the songs depending on your preference of where each song or track should be. So this is the final step, is to order the songs that you have in your playlist. You can arrange the songs in any order that you want. If you want to rearrange the songs, click the song and drag it up or down the playlist so that you can drop it either before a preferred song or after a preferred song.

Fourth is listening to the songs that you have. If you want to listen to the songs that you have on your playlist, simply double click on the first song or you can also click it and press play on the top left corner of the window so that you can listen to the first song. If you want to play the songs in a random order, you can shuffle the songs on the playlist by clicking the shuffle button. After clicking it, the songs will play on a random manner.

So this is it. Very simple way to create a playlist in your iTunes music library. If you want to get your iTunes fixed and cleaned up. Check out RealNetworks Rinse program below.


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