iTunes – A great way to organize and play your music and media

[Click on the Video, below, to watch it]

Having just finished up another one of our iDevice and Digital Music classes at our teaching lab in Lincoln, Nebraska, fresh on my mind is what a great program, iTunes is.

If you’re not familiar with iTunes, it’s a free program you can download from Apple.com, and use to organize and play all your media files (music, video, TV Shows, etc.). Not only that, but you can also use it to “rip” your music CD collection (which means copy the tracks from the CD over to your computer), and better yet, access the Apple iTunes store and purchase everything from music, to movies, to TV Shows, and beyond.

Sounds pretty good, doesn’t it?

Now, as I’ve said many times in other blog posts, I’m not a big Apple-guy. I’ve been using PC’s since the early 1980’s, and have taught PC’ technology for the past 25 years. Still, I’ve been an iTunes fan since it first came out, because I’ve always believed it’s one of the best computer media players/organizers out there.

I’m not at all, a fan of the Windows Media Player, since it’s way too cumbersome to use as an organizer. Yes, I use it to play media now and then, but most of my media-time is spent with iTunes.

Anyway, iTunes is great, and in our iDevice classes where we teach folks how to work with digital media and use their iDevices (iPads, iPods, iPhones), we make a big deal of teaching folks how to use iTunes.

So, just for fun, I thought I’d pass along a little of that teaching here, in the form of a two-part video blog that overviews the main iTunes features.

In this first part, we’ll take a look at the iTunes interface and learn the basics of how to navigate around, access your media, and put it into Playlists.

Then, in part two, we’ll specifically look at how to add music to your iTunes Library, including how you use iTunes to rip CDs, how to add folders of music manually, and finally, how to access and use the online iTunes Store.

And as always, if you have any questions or comments, please leave them in the comments area below.