Chapter 12. Using iPhoto and iTunes

IN THIS CHAPTER:

81 About iTunes and Digital Music

82 Purchase Music from the iTunes Music Store

83 Import (or Rip) an Audio CD

84 Create a Playlist or Smart Playlist

85 Create (or Burn) a Custom Audio CD

86 Synchronize with an iPod

87 About iPhoto and Digital Photography

88 Import Photos from a Digital Camera

89 Create an iPhoto Album or Slideshow

90 Print Photos

91 Order Photo Prints Online

92 Create an iPhoto Book

93 Create an Online Photo Album

If you're a music lover, a musician, a digital photographer, or a video or movie buff with a Mac, you can already count yourself luckyyou've got a computer that comes preloaded with some of the best software and tools for finding, creating, obtaining, playing, and storing all these kinds of media.

iLife is the name for the packaged collection of Apple's five leading multimedia applications that ship with all new Macs: iTunes (for buying and listening to digital music), GarageBand (for creating original musical compositions), iPhoto (for digital photography), iMovie (for digital video editing), andif you're lucky enough to have a Mac with a DVD-writing drive (a "SuperDrive," in Apple's parlance) iDVD , for writing your digital video and photography projects onto DVDs (Digital Versatile Discs) that you can then play on any commercial DVD player. All of these applications work in concert, sharing their digital media with each other; your digital music in iTunes is available for use in the soundtracks of your home movies in iMovie, and iMovie can export its video directly to iDVD, for example. These five applications turn your Mac into what Steve Jobs called the "digital hub": the computer that sits at the center of your digital lifestyle.

KEY TERMS

QuickTime The multimedia subsystem embedded in Mac OS X that provides for playback of all music, image, and video data.

DVD Digital Versatile Disc, the increasingly popular CD- sized medium for commercial movies as well as home videos and computer data.

iLife The packaged combination of iTunes, iMovie, iPhoto, iDVD, and GarageBand.

The first technology for you to understand as part of this topic is QuickTime , which is the underlying video playback and multimedia software subsystem embedded throughout Mac OS X and underlying all the applications in iLife. Far from being a simple "video player" application (as it may appear at first, or to Windows users who have had to install the QuickTime Player to watch video files at some time in the past), QuickTime is the basis for all the media you interact with on your Mac, from such simple tasks as handling sound input and output on your Mac to high-level ones such as watching DVD movies on your computer.

Two of the iLife components , iTunes and iPhoto, are applications with wide purpose, allowing you to harness digital music and digital photography, respectively, and perform a wide variety of tasks related to working with those kinds of media.

iTunes and iPhoto each contain a "Library" of digital content: music in iTunes, and photos in iPhoto. The other three componentsiMovie, iDVD, and GarageBandare creative applications, designed to let you start with raw media and edit it into a final presentable form (using available media from your iTunes and iPhoto Libraries) that you can then export into another iLife application or to a recipient on the Internet. These three applications are not covered in this book.

Each of the iLife applications, while designed for simplicity rather than feature richness, makes for a very complex subject; for more in-depth coverage of all of them, pick up a copy of one of the many books available that are dedicated to iLife as a package, or to iTunes, iMovie, iPhoto, iDVD, or GarageBand as an individual topic.