The Power of iTunes
Everybody knows iTunes by now thanks to the popularity of the iconic Apple iPod. Everyone who owns an iPod MUST use the iTunes software to manage their music for their iPod. Several years ago prior to the iPod and iTunes, I started to RIP all of my CD collection onto my computer so I could listen to music while I worked. When it came to listening to music on my expensive sound system in the living room, CD's still ruled.
Music
Fast forward several years, where mass storage is far more affordable, Apple Mac's are much smaller and cheaper, and iTunes exists - with capabilities far beyond beyond a simple music player. Today my expensive sound system has no CD player in it at all, it has been replaced by a Mac Pro with a 2TB internal RAID. All of my over 1100 CD's are ripped to the RAID in Apple Lossless Format.
iTunes with Coverflow
Your first question
would be about sound quality out of a Mac Pro
right? Not an issue! The Mac Pro as a Toslink Optical
Digital Audio output and I feed this digital
signal straight into my high end DAC to get the best sound quality
I can from my music collection.
Next I added CD covers into iTunes so that I could
still 'see' my CD collection. With the latest
version of iTunes they incorporated the brilliant
'Coverflow' application which Apple bought from the
original genius who came up with the idea. It
basically allows you to scroll left to right
through your CD covers, not unlike you do when
looking through CD's at a music store. You can get
many of the covers from sites like Amazon, but the
quality is only just OK in my view, and most
Australian music is not available there so you have
to scour the local online music stores who have
even worse quality. So I took the next logical step
- I scanned in all of my Australian music CD covers
which took a long time but was well worth the
effort!
So what have I done to my CD collection? Firstly, I
have to say the worse thing about owning 1100 plus
CD's is the space they take up and I have spent
years carting the things from house to house, it is
a real pain. So, I have thrown away all of the the
plastic cases and bought cases that each hold 500
CD’s, and have stored them all away as my
'backup' should anything happen to my RAID.
So do I still buy CD's or download from iTunes
music store? Well, until they make downloadable
music uncompressed and DRM (Digital Rights
Management) free, I will continue to buy CD's. I do
not like to pay for low quality compressed versions
of the songs I like, so I am happy to buy the CD
because it gives me the choice of how I compress it
and I have a backup.
Movies
No I am NOT talking about the movies
you can buy from the iTunes music store, I am
talking about your DVD collection and your home
movies. I like most people thought that iTunes
could only store and playback video files formatted
in size to suit the iPod, ie: 640x480. Wrong!
You can add full res movies which are 720x576 for
PAL, right through to high resolution videos
including 1920x1080. Just drag the files to the
iTunes window and they are added to the library.
And speaking of Library, notice how iTunes now has
Library as the top item in the left menu list, with
three sub categories below: Music, Movies and TV
Shows. This is the key to iTunes being THE media
server!
Anyway, back to movies - once you have the movies
in your iTunes Library, you can start to add DVD
covers, just like you did with your CD collection.
Selecting a movie to watch is as simple as it is
with CD's, hit the enter key and the movie opens in
full screen mode, when it is finished, it closes to
show the iTunes interface once again, perfect!
Movies in iTunes with Coverflow
Now, the fine print -
you can not simply put your DVD into your Mac and
get iTunes to RIP it into your library - yet. I do
believe it will come however. So for now you have
to use a third party application to do the ripping
for you - I would suggest Handbrake as it works very well.
There are of course other choices.
TV Shows
Our final option in the library is
TV Shows. How do you use this? Well let's say you
have a PVR (Personal Video Recorder) which allows
you to download the recorded shows to your
computer, such as the Topfield 5000 Masterpiece.
What do you do with them once you have them on the
Mac? Well you RIP them using MPEG Streamclip, into
a format that iTunes can read (ie: MP4) and add
them to your Library, just as you did with your
Movies and CD's.
Just like with CD's and Movies, you can add 'covers' to the TV Shows as well, making for a visual delight when browsing your colleciton of favourite TV Shows. You can of course display the covers just like the Movies and CD's using the Coverflow option, or you can display them by season and episode, as shown below.
TV Shows by Season and Episode
Music Videos
One other option relating to music
which must be mentioned, is the ability to
categorise a movie file as a Music Video. When you
select this option for a movie file it is
automatically added to your Music Library, not your
Movie Library.
This is great as iTunes can shuffle your music
library and throw in the odd Music Video from time
to time, sweet! So start transferring all your old
VHS tapes of 70's and 80's music videos into iTunes
and your next party is set to rock!
Playlists
One of the greatest features of
iTunes is the ability to create playlists. You can
create standard playlists which you manage the
content of manually by adding songs to the playlist
yourself. The best option however is the Smart
Playlist option, which allows you to set a number
of paramaters and iTunes adds content on the fly
when content is added to your library that meets
the criteria you have set for the Smart Playlist.
The really cool thing is you can create playlists for movie files as well. So if you are at home on the couch not feeling to well, what better way to spend the time than watching Top Gear all day right? Simply create a playlist and add several Top Gear episodes to the playlist, and press play. iTunes will play all episodes one after the other. You can even do the same thing for your music videos, which is great for parties.
As you can see from this brief outline, iTunes is a powerful media manager and not just a music player as many believe it to be, so get into it and start enjoying all the media you have!