Gadgetory

there is no reason to be holding onto your CDs inning between iTunes and Spotify and about a hundred other services anything you've listened to can be downloaded again or streamed at your convenience but there are some exceptions you're probably holding on to a box full of rare sentimental mix CDs that you haven't yet gotten onto your computer and let go of I'm gonna show you how to do that quickly and painlessly so here's what you're gonna need you're gonna need a computer with a CD drive and iTunes on it could be any version of iTunes you're gonna need your CDs and you're gonna need a smartphone the first step is to take a picture of your CD now this one is a great example this is a CD I got from a friend in Japan this cover this is what I'm sentimental about so I'm gonna take a picture of this and if you can put this into square mode that's gonna really save yourself some time and some cropping take the picture boom and then email it to yourself so now the next step is to get the CD into your computer now once the CDs in iTunes is gonna automatically try to pull down any information that it might have about the CD it's gonna try its best to identify the tracks and the titles but in this case because this is a one-of-a-kind CD iTunes is gonna draw a blank it's gonna give me a generic listing you called audio CD and generic tracks called track 1 through 14 so the trick is we need to identify all this information ourselves do that hit the CD info button and it's going to put my friend's name on here the artist album is going to be from Japan that's probably how I'll remember it alright the next step here is to import the CD you go and hit the import CD button in the top right corner you're gonna get a box that will let you change how you're gonna import the CD for me more about sentimentality than about audio quality I'll go with an AAC at about 128 kilobits per second it's gonna give you better quality than mp3 at about the exact same amount of time if you're really gonna go crazy with the steps you can go all the way up to lossless audio quality but after you do a few of these you're gonna realize that speed is much more important than audiophile quality all right now I've got the CD in our library with album artwork one more tip bill if you want to add more images than just that one to your album you can go track by track hit get info and add a separate image you get creative alright so that's the entire process for digitizing your CDs into your iTunes library now for an extra added value you can take advantage of Apple's iTunes Match service where for $24.99 a year you can upload all the stuff to the cloud and have it backed up and be able to stream it back to any of your Apple devices