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.