RIP. MIX. BURN
How to import and manage your own Music collection
As lovely as it is to have an extensive collection of CDs, you can’t beat the convenience of digital music. The first iPod promised 1,000 songs in your pocket and today’s iPod touch or iPhone has room for more music than most of us buy in a lifetime, with Macs offering even more. So how do you get your CDs into the Apple Music app, or iTunes on older Macs, so you can play them, share them and even burn your own CDs from them?
The good news is it’s really simple; if you have a CD/DVD drive in your Mac just put the CD in the drive and your Music app will look it up online and find the title, track details and artwork. If your Mac doesn’t have a CD/DVD drive you can attach one via USB. Apple still makes the USB SuperDrive, a CD/DVD player and burner, and there are plenty of more affordable third-party options too.
Before you start to import, it’s worth taking a trip into the Music app’s settings (in Music > Preferences). If you have an internal CD/DVD drive or have connected an external one you should see an option in the General tab for ‘When a CD is inserted’. You can choose between Show CD, which displays the disc in Music but doesn’t play it; Play CD, which does what you’d expect; Import CD, which automatically copies the whole CD to your Library; and Import CD and Eject. This last option is best if you’re going to be importing multiple discs.
In Preferences, click on Files and ensure ‘Keep Music Media folder organised’ and ‘Copy files To Music Media folder’ are both ticked. This means your music always goes to the same place on your Mac, or on an external drive if you’re short of storage. If you have multiple users on your Mac you should do this on their accounts too, ensuring that the location of their media folder is under
their own user account – /Macintosh HD/ Users/[their username]/Music. This ensures that everybody’s music is stored separately. You can all share the same storage location if you prefer; once you’ve got your Library on one account, open another and in Music use File > Import.
Next, click Import Settings. This is where you decide what file format and file quality your music will be when it’s copied to your library. The default is Apple’s AAC format, which is designed for mobile music; it’s not full quality but it’s hard to tell the difference on ordinary earbuds and the file sizes are fairly small.
Apple Lossless is our pick, as it stores the music without removing any of its musical information. That means you get the full audio experience without any loss of quality. If you want that but also want to make your files compatible with music apps, you can choose AIFF or WAV instead. They’re lossless formats too, but they’re less efficient than Apple Lossless so the files require a bit more space.
Once you’ve got your settings ready, look at the CD in your Music app and check that the details you see on screen are correct: is the artwork okay? Are the song titles correct? You can change this afterwards on individual tracks or albums by selecting them, ≈-clicking and choosing Get Info, or with a third-party fixer (see ‘Fix Your Music Library – Fast’), but it’s better to get it right first time.