Gathering Your Music from All the Right Places

If you are going to add music to your Library, you have to get it from somewhere, right? The following are the three main sources of tunes for your Library:

• Audio CDs—Who wants to bother with audio CDs? Wouldn’t it be nice if you could store all of the content of your CD collection in one place so you can listen to any music you want to at any time just by browsing or doing a quick search? Obviously, that is a loaded question because you already know you can use iTunes to do just that. In this chapter, you’ll learn how to copy the music from audio CDs into your Library so that you never have to use the original CDs again.
  
• MP3 and other audio files—You can add audio files in just about any format to your Library. For example, there are lots of free and legal MP3 files on the Web that you can add to your own Library. In this chapter, you will learn how to add music to your Library in this way too.
  
• iTunes Music Store—With the iTunes Music Store, you can browse and search among hundreds of thousands of songs.

When you find music you like, you can purchase an entire CD’s worth of songs or you can buy individual songs (can you say one-hit wonders!). When you buy a song, it is downloaded and added to your iTunes Library. Instead of ordering a CD or, even worse, buying one in a real store, your music is available to you instantly, and you don’t even have to import it. Because the iTunes Music Store is so cool,