Rip It, Rip It Good

Ripping music from your existing CD collection is a perfect way to add music to your iPod. This process has to be done one CD at a time, but the upside is that you have complete control over which tracks are imported to your iPod.

When you open the iTunes interface, the program should find any CD you’ve inserted into your computer and pull up the list of songs with check marks to the left of them. If you don’t want to import a certain song, just click the box to uncheck it. Click the button labeled Import CD to pull the songs you want into iTunes. (But you may as well import the entire CD, since you don’t need to put every song you import onto your iPod.) Once imported, each song will show a green check mark beside it. If it is in the process of loading, it will have an orange wavy line next to it.  

The default compression format is AAC, or Advanced Audio Coding, which gives better sound quality than comparable-sized MP3s. If you’d rather import your music as MP3s, you’ll need to tell iTunes before you start ripping. The Help files can walk you through the process quickly.

When you’ve finished ripping your music, look under Playlists to the header marked Recently Added. You should see a list of the songs you just imported from your CD. You may also look under the Library heading under Music and look up the genre, artist name and/or album name to find your songs. Once you’re sure they’re imported into iTunes correctly, you’re ready to import the rest of your CDs to get your music library started!