Now that I have an Apple iPod Touch and have figured out how to get it working on my Microsoft Windows Vista PC, my question is how do I import music CDs into iTunes?
Congrats on your new Apple iPod Touch. They’re fun gizmos: I have one of them myself. It’s kind of a hybrid somewhere between a regular music iPod and an iPhone. You’ve done the hard work of getting iTunes on your Windows PC and setting up your iPod Touch to work with it, so that’s good.
What you’re asking is really more akin to Apple iTunes 101: how do you import a music CD?
The problem is, because Windows Vista has two very distinct versions of the operating system (32 bit and 64 bit) there are also two versions of iTunes you can download from Apple too, and if you install the wrong version then you won’t be able to do anything with your music CDs. If that happens, just download the 64 bit version from Apple (go to the downloads area) and install it over the 32 bit version and you’ll be good to go.
Now, with iTunes running, insert a music CD and you’ll promptly see:
Simple enough. Click on “Yes” and iTunes will start chugging along, importing the tracks one-by-one. It’ll look like this as it goes:
To zoom in a bit (since I know that gets pretty small here), here’s what you’re seeing:
As you can see, there’s a green check icon adjacent to CD tracks that have been imported and an orange sine wave icon for the track it’s actually importing. If you look on the top window you’ll see a progress bar:
Not only can you see how much time it estimates is left on this particular track import (56 seconds), but also how fast it’s importing the music too (10.1x). That gives you a sense for the entire import: if you have 60 minutes of music on your music CD, for example, at a rate of 10.1x it’ll take iTunes 5.9 minutes to import every track.
By default Apple iTunes imports music in its own AAC format, but you might want to switch it to WMA (windows media audio, the default from Windows Media Player) or MP3 (the most common format of portable audio players). To do that, just click on “Import Settings…”
Ready to eject the music CD because it’s all been imported? Look on the left under Devices and you’ll see the CD listed. Next to it is a small grey circle with an upward pointing white triangle:
Click on that triangle and the disk’ll be ejected from your computer.
Viola! You’ve done it!
Hi Dave, I had a new hard drive install in my computer. Today I install itunes 9.1 for Windows Vista 32 Bit. I try to import a CD into itunes and is not importing the music into my itunes library, its cutting each music in half. I try everything but I don’t know what to do. Can you please help me. Thanks. Debora
What is the best (easiest) way to convert music from CD’s into a format that Itunes can work with to transfer to a new I-Pod Nano which I am thinking of buying but want to be able to load my own music from my CD collection?
Any help would be greatly appreciated.
Steve, yes, you can set all four of them up on your single computer running iTunes and have them share purchases too, just authorize each as you go. Purchases can be on up to five computers, so that’d be four iPods + the computer itself.
We have 4 ipods (different models) but only one computer. Is it possible to set each of them up with their own Itunes account? Or can we all use the same account?