Sharing your sounds, fixing mangled metadata and transforming your TV experience couldn’t be easier

Back in 2001 – yes folks, 21 years ago – Apple urged us to Think Different about music. That year’s iMac included a new bit of hardware, a CD drive that could also burn CDs whose contents were picked by you from your music library. That Mac came with a new slogan – Rip. Mix. Burn – and it was soon followed by something Apple called the iPod. That turned out to be quite a big deal.

To begin with, Apple thought we’d copy CDs to our hard disks and to our iPods. But, as internet connections got faster and storage space got cheaper, Apple moved to selling downloads with the iTunes Music Store in 2003, adding TV shows and movies in 2006. It began phasing out optical drives in Macs with the MacBook Air in 2008, and in 2015 it launched the Apple Music streaming service; Apple TV+ followed in 2019. Apple still sells digital downloads, but it would much rather you took out a streaming subscription.

As much as we love streaming, we have existing libraries of music and video from the days when iMacs could still rip, mix and burn. In this feature, we’ll discover how your existing libraries can live with Apple’s newer services in perfect harmony. We’ll also discover what pitfalls to watch out for, how to get the most music and movie bang for your subscription buck and what to do when you encounter problems with media in your library.