Downloading and Installing iTunes on a Windows PC

It can be better to download a copy of iTunes from the Internet to install it on your computer even if you have a copy on the iPod CD. That’s because the application is periodically updated. When you download a copy from the Web, you get the latest and greatest version. When you install a copy from the CD, you get the latest and greatest version when the CD was produced, which might not be the current latest and greatest.
If you want to download and install a copy of iTunes, perform the following steps:

1. Open your favorite Web browser, such as Internet Explorer.
2. Move to http://www.apple.com/itunes.
3. Click the Download link. You will see the Download page.
4. Scroll down the page until you see the Download iTunes section
5. Click the Windows 2000 or XP radio button.
6. Enter your email address if you want to subscribe to any of Apple’s iTunes newsletters; if you don’t, you can leave this blank.
7. Enter your first and last name if you want to (this is optional information).
8. Choose the area in which you live in the drop-down list.
9. Check the boxes for the Apple newsletters you want to receive (or uncheck the boxes for any Apple newsletters you don’t want to receive). For example, the New Music Tuesdays newsletter lets you know about music that has been added to the iTunes Music Store.
10. Click Download iTunes. In most cases, you will see the Security Warning dialog box. If you don’t have your Web browser configured to present this, you will move directly to the Save As dialog box, in which case you can skip the next step.
11. In the Security Warning dialog box, click Yes to indicate that you want to install and run the iTunes Installer. The InstallShield Wizard will open and start the installation process. After a moment or two, you will see the iTunes for Windows window
12. Read the information in the Installer window and click Next.
13. If you have a lot of time and patience, read the license agreement; when you are done, click Yes if you agree or No if you don’t. (Of course, if you don’t agree, you can skip the rest of these steps and the rest of this part of the book because you won’t be able to use iTunes.)
14. In the resulting Information window, you can read information about iTunes, such as what it can do and what you need to install it. Because you have this book, you don’t really need to read this information, but it can’t hurt to do so! When you are done reading, click Next. You’ll see the Setup Type window (see Figure 13.3) .
15. Check the following options to make them active or uncheck them to make them inactive:
• Install desktop shortcuts—This option places a shortcut to iTunes on your desktop. Unless you don’t like desktop shortcuts for some reason, you should usually leave this option checked.
• Use iTunes as the default player for audio files—This option causes iTunes to be used to play most audio files that you will access on the Internet, your computer, CDs, and so on. If you prefer to use another application, such as Window Media Player, uncheck this check box. However, I recommend that you leave it checked for now. You can always change the default application to be something else after you have become comfortable with iTunes (not that you’ll want to!).
• Use QuickTime as the default player for media files—If you choose this option, the QuickTime Player application will be used when you view video or other multimedia content. Just like the previous option, if you prefer to use a different application, uncheck this check box.
16. Click Next. You’ll see the Choose Destination Location dialog box.
17. If you don’t want to accept the default installation location (which is C:\Program Files\iTunes\), click the Browse button and choose the location you do want to use. Then click Next. You’ll see a window advertising the iPod.
18. Click Next. As the Installer starts to work, you will see the Setup Status window. This window provides you with information about the installation When the process is complete, you will see the Installation Successful window.
19. Click Finish to restart your computer and complete the installation process. When your computer restarts, iTunes will be ready for you.

Installing iTunes on a Windows PC

Over the years, Apple has produced a few applications designed for both Windows PCs and Macintoshes. Thank goodness for Windows users that iTunes is also in this group. (None of the others are worthy of much mention, but iTunes is definitely a crossover hit!)
In order to use iTunes on a Windows computer, you must be running Windows Vista or Windows XP. If you are running Windows 98, Me, or 95, you are out of the iTunes game. (Of course, those older versions of Windows are really old and you should be using a newer version for more reasons than just the ability to run iTunes!)
You have two primary ways to get a copy of iTunes and install it on your computer. (The good news is that neither way will cost you any more money than you have already spent.) First, if you have purchased an iPod, which is a likely case given that you are reading a blog about iPods, a copy of iTunes is provided on the CD included with every iPod. Second, if you don’t have an iPod or if you don’t have the CD that came with it for some reason, you can download iTunes from the Internet.

The iPod and the iTunes Music Store

When it comes to citizenship, iTunes definitely gets an A+ because it plays so well with others.
If you have read Part I, “The iPod,” you know that the iPod might just be the coolest portable electronic device ever to hit the streets. Although the iPod is indeed an awesome piece of technology, it wouldn’t get very far without a tool to manage the music it contains. iTunes is that tool. iTunes and the iPod go together like a 1-2 combination punch, peanut butter and jelly, jalapenos on a pizza, Bing Crosby and Bob Hope (well, you get the idea). Using iTunes, you can determine which parts of your music library are on the iPod. iTunes manages moving the music files to the iPod and organizing them, so the process is quite simple (from your perspective anyway).

In fact, iTunes will manage the process for you automatically if you prefer; when you connect your trusty iPod to your computer, iTunes will recognize it and then synchronize the music it has in your Library with that on your iPod. You will learn in detail about the last part of the digital music triumvirate: the iTunes Music Store. With the iTunes Music Store, you can shop for music to add to your Library. When you find songs you’d like to have, you can purchase and download them into your iTunes Library with just a couple mouse clicks. And you can do all this from within iTunes itself. It feels like the iTunes Music Store is just an extension of iTunes, which, in fact, it is. You access the iTunes Music Store from within iTunes, and the Store uses an interface that looks very similar to iTunes. So, once you know iTunes, you won’t have any problems with the iTunes Music Store.

Playlists: Customize Your Music Experience

I’ve saved one of the best features of iTunes for nearly last—playlists. Playlists enable you to create custom collections of music from the songs in your iTunes Library. (If you think of a playlist as a custom CD without the disc, you will be very close.)
When you create playlists, you can mix and match music to your heart’s content. For example, you can build your own “greatest hits” collections that include multiple artists, music genres, and so on. You can repeat the same song multiple times in the same playlist. You can also get rid of songs you don’t like by not including them in the playlists you listen to. What’s more, you can create a playlist to include a specific amount of music from a single CD or endlessly repeat all the music in your Library.
Basically, you can use playlists to organize a collection of songs in any way you choose. You can then listen to your playlists, put them on a CD, or move them to an iPod.

Where Does All That Music Come From?

You have three primary sources of the music and sounds from which you will build your iTunes Library:

• Audio CDs—You can add music from your audio CDs to the iTunes Library. In iTunes lingo, this process is called importing.
• The Internet—You can download music and other audio files from the Internet and add those files to your iTunes Library.
• The iTunes Music Store—Using the iTunes Music Store, you can search for, preview, and purchase music online and add that music to your Library.

AIFF and iTunes

The Audio Interchange File Format (AIFF) provides relatively high-quality sound, but its file sizes are larger than MP3 or AAC. As you can probably guess from its name, this format was originally used to exchange audio among various platforms. As with the WAV format, because the MP3 and AAC formats provide better sound quality in smaller file sizes, you aren’t likely to use the AIFF format very often. The most likely situation in which you might want to use it is when you want to move some music or sound from your iTunes collection into a different application that does not support the MP3 or AAC format.

WAV and iTunes

The Windows Waveform (WAV) audio format is a standard on Windows computers. It has been widely used for various kinds of audio, but because it does not offer the “quality versus file size” benefits of the MP3 or AAC formats, it is mostly used for sound effects or clips that people have recorded from various sources. Millions of WAV files are available on the Internet that you can play and download.
You can load WAV files into iTunes, and you can even use iTunes to convert files into the WAV format. However, because MP3 and AAC are much newer and better file formats, you aren’t likely to want to do this very often. Occasionally, you might want to add WAV files to your iTunes music collection; this can be easily done, as you will learn later in this blog.

AAC and iTunes

The newest digital audio format is called Advanced Audio Coding or AAC. This format is part of the larger MPEG-4 specification. Its basic purpose is the same as the MP3 format: to deliver excellent sound quality while keeping file sizes small. However, the AAC format is a newer and better format in that it can be used to produce files that have better quality than MP3 at even smaller file sizes. Also, as with MP3, you can easily convert audio CD files into the AAC format to store them on a computer and add them to an iPod. What’s more, you can convert AAC files into the Audio CD or MP3 format when you want to put them on a CD to play on something other than your computer, such as a car stereo.
The AAC format also enables content producers to add some copy-protection schemes to their music.
Typically, these schemes won’t have any impact on you (unless of course, you are trying to do something you shouldn’t).
One of the most important aspects of the AAC format is that all the music in the iTunes Music Store is stored in it; when you purchase music from the store, it is added to your computer in this format.

MP3 and iTunes

Even if this blog is your first foray into the wonderful world of digital music, you have no doubt heard of MP3. This audio file format started, literally, an explosion in music technology that is still reverberating and expanding today. MP3 is the acronym for the audio compression scheme called Moving Picture Experts Group (MPEG) audio layer 3. The revolutionary aspect of the MP3 encoding scheme was that music data could be stored in files that are only about one-twelfth the size of unencoded digital music without a noticeable degradation in the quality of the music. A typical music CD consumes about 650MB of storage space, but the same music encoded in the MP3 format shrinks down to about 55MB. Put another way, a single 3.5-minute song shrinks from its 35MB on audio CD down to a paltry 3MB or so in MP3 format. The small size of MP3 files opened up a world of possibilities.
For example, MP3 enabled a new class of portable music devices. Because MP3 files can be stored in small amounts of memory, devices with no moving parts can store and play a fair amount of music; these were the early MP3 players, such as the Rio. Then came other devices containing small hard drives—can you say iPod?—that can store huge amounts of music, enabling you to take your entire music collection with you wherever you go. These devices are extremely small and lightweight, and their contents can be easily managed.
You will encounter many MP3 files on the Internet, and with iTunes, you can convert your audio CDs into the MP3 format so that you can store them in iTunes and put them on an iPod.

CD Audio and iTunes

The CD Audio format was the world’s first widely used entry in the digital audio format life cycle. The creation of this format was the start of the CD revolution. Instead of vinyl albums, which were a pain to deal with and included lots of hisses, pops, and other distractions when played, listeners began enjoying digital music. In addition to being much easier to handle than LPs, CDs provided a much better listening experience and were—and are—much more durable than records.
They also sounded much better than cassettes and could be just as portable.
Eventually, CD Audio made its way to computers, which now can provide all the music-listening enjoyment of a home stereo plus much more, thanks to applications such as iTunes.
Although you can use iTunes to listen to your audio CDs, typically you will just convert those CDs into one of the newer digital formats and store that content on your computer’s hard disk so you don’t have to use a CD when you want to listen to music. You will also make use of this format when you put your iTunes music on your own audio CD so that you can play your iTunes music when you are away from your computer.