Importing Music from a CD

In this lesson for iTunes on the Mac, we look at how we set up iTunes to import music from our CDs. If you have an older Mac with a CD player and a lot of CD’s you’d like to import, you may find some helpful tips in this lesson.

Setting what you want iTunes to do when inserting a CD
The first thing you’ll want to do before you import any CDs is to look at your settings in iTunes. To view the Import CD Settings, you need to go to iTunes Preferences. You’ll find the Preferences under iTunes in the Menu Bar. Once you select the Preferences, you’ll get a new window that opens up. Make sure you choose General under the Preferences categories.

Towards the bottom of the General Preferences, you’ll see ‘When CD is Inserted.’ This is where you can set what happens when you insert a CD. You can set it to Play, Import, Import and Eject, as well as a few other options. If you are importing a number of CDs, I’d recommend Import and Eject. When you select this, once iTunes imports the CD, it will eject, and you can insert another CD to import.

Import Settings
By default, iTunes will import your music as an AAC Encoded file. This type of file will work on all your Apple devices and most other devices. It’s a good compromise between good quality and small file size. But if you’d rather import your CDs as an MP3 file, you’ll what to click on Import Settings. When you do this, you can set what type of file you want to import your CDs as well as the quality. The higher the quality, the larger the file will be. Once you set the options, just close the window, and your settings will be applied.

Error Correction
If you have a problem importing a CD, you may want to turn on Error Correction. This is also under the Import Settings. When you do this, iTunes will slow down the import process thereby improving the import process. I would recommend leaving this off unless you are having an issue with a CD as it slows down the process quite a bit.

See this Lesson in Action
If you want to see this lesson in action, take a look at the video above.

Lesson tags: Mac Tutorials
Back to: Tutor for iTunes for the Mac > Importing Options