Posted by The Mac Dude on 07/06/07 05:58

In article <1183649210.441651.55920@j4g2000prf.googlegroups.com>,
El Cazador <vrstull@aol.com> wrote:

> Relatively new to Mac. One things that confuses my too-lazy-or-it's-
> too-complicated-to-learn brain is how to import and burn mp3? If a CD
> is inserted it automatically goes to iTunes. I don't even know what
> format is copies in! So, how does one go about setting up another
> folder to store mp3's?? I have Toast & Jam but have yet to try to use
> it as I did with my P.C. Thanks for any help. Speak slow and use
> little words if you CAN help. Thanks a again.

I am not the most expert, but here are some hints.

On a CD, the sound is in an uncompressed format which is called (I
believe) AIFF. In iTunes, you can set what format to import the CD into
(Preferences:Importing on my old iTunes V4). Shove the CD in & let
iTunes import. It will create files in the selected format. If you want
to burn yourself an MP3 CD from several normal CDs you'd import as MP3
and then burn the playlist. I think in that way you can get about 6
albums onto one CD. You do not need any extra burning software like
Toast; OS X has the burning built-in & you can burn directly from
iTunes. To listen to the CD made thus you do need a CD player that can
play MP3 CDs, not all do that (at least not a few years back, I haven't
checked recently).

Importing an MP3 source (CD or other) is similar. You may have to
explicitly select Import from the file menu, though. Note that
commercial music CDs are never MP3 encoded, AFAIK.

As far as storing MP3s, iTunes does that for you upon importing & you
probably want to just let it do its thing. Again, if you select MP3 as
the importing option that's what it will create. If you use an iPod,
select AAC as the format, it is claimed to be somewhat better quality
for the same file size & bit rate (I personally cannot comment on this),
but not many other players can play AAC files so MP3 is more universal.
If you need files accessible in a folder, just drag them out of the
iTunes window into the folder which will make a duplicate (in the same
format as iTunes has it stored). There is also a dedicated "Convert to
MP3" menu item which will convert non-MP3 songs. I don't like it as in
my case the result ends up in the library under the same name as the
original & I have to hunt the MP3 files thus created down.

These comments apply to the Mac version of iTunes, I don't know how
similar the Windows version is. Also , I am using an old version (4).

HTH,

Mac Dude.

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