AirPlay.

[itsbob]

Not a big Apple fan but did get BG an iPad, and we have a 3d TV. The Sony amp I had wouldn't pass through 3d, sooooo off to get a new amp/receiver.
Shopping I saw mention of AirPlay and figured why not, I got an airplay capable receiver. Took me awhile to set it up, but it works great.

The receiver and the iPad communicate through the home wireless network, and the iPad plays (automatically) through the home stereo.
I think it's the coolest app ever, though there is nothing to download.

No docks no cables, great sound.

Sooooo who wants to school me on how to go from CD to iTunes?

[Tilted (Premo)]

I use AirPlay quite a bit. If I'm not mistaken though, the AirPlay-enabled receivers can only do audio streaming. Perhaps you can confirm that for me. I have an Apple TV box which allows me to use AirPlay to mirror most anything on any of my iOS devices (or Mac) to my TV. Or I can stream any media I have on any of those devices, from either of my computers (including my PC), or from my iCloud accounts to the TV or stereo system - movies, videos, pictures, music. That box is something like a Roku, but it doesn't offer nearly as many 'channels'. It has Netflix, YouTube, Hulu Plus and a few others - but the main benefit of it is the AirPlay functionality.

As for your moving from CDs to iTunes, I did that myself a couple of years ago. I had several thousand CDs but only a small portion of them were ripped into my iTunes library (to listen to on the computer or load on MP3 players that I had). When iTunes Match was introduced I decided to rip my entire CD library and not be bothered with CDs at all anymore. It doesn't require much effort, but if you have a lot of CDs it will take a while.

I would recommend that you go into Preferences in iTunes and, under the General tab, select Import CD and Eject where it asks When you insert a CD. I would also check that box that says Automaticaly retrieve CD track names from internet. Once you've done that, all you need to do is insert one CD after the other and iTunes will do the rest for you. Whenever I was using my computer for other reasons, I'd have a case of CDs nearby and insert a new one when I noticed it eject the previous one. The process didn't need to consume much of my attention. And if most of your CDs are normal store bought ones, it will be able to pull the track names for you and fill in much of the meta data about each song / album. Every now and then it will find a CD it doesn't know and you'll have to go back and fill in the song names yourself. It can also pull track names for homemade CDs, but not as reliably.

You can also add any music you happen to already have on your computer to the iTunes library - digital purchases you may have made from somewhere else (e.g. Amazon) or MP3 files you got from other sources. One of the pulldown menus will have an Add to Library… option. When you're adding music you have elsewhere on your computer, you can decide to have iTunes make a copy of it and place that copy in its file directory or, in effect, just make a note of where it is so it can use it when it needs to.

Before you rip all your CDs you might want to tinker with the encoding method / quality settings. Under Preferences > General > Import Settings you'll find a number of options. You can rip songs as AAC files, AIFF files, MP3 files, WAV files, or Apple Lossless files. For most of those you can also adjust the bit rate. I use AAC files and the iTunes Plus default bit rate (256 kbs). The quality is pretty good and the files still don't take up too much space. However, if you don't want to sacrifice any quality - especially if you'll be playing your music at a decent volume - you might want to try Apple Lossless. That will eat up a lot of storage space, and if you're streaming it over WiFi while other people are loading the WiFi network you may experience some lag. My recommendation would be to rip a few CDs as Apple Lossless and as, e.g., AAC and compare how they sound through your stereo (compare them blindly if possible ). You can then decide if the quality difference is noticeable and meaningful enough to you. If you rip everything as Apple Loseless, you can always go back and convert those files to AAC.

From there, I'm not sure what else you're interested in doing / knowing. I use iTunes Match myself, but that might not be too useful for you if you only have 1 iOS device - you can probably just load whatever music you want on the iPad. If you have specific questions about what's possible or how to do it, feel free to ask.


EDIT: There's also a setting in iTunes under Preferences > Store that will allow it to automatically retrieve the artwork for the CDs you import. It doesn't always find it automatically, but it does more often than not. And I should have mentioned playlists, you'll most likely want to make some of those (e.g. christmas music, party music, rock). Once you have the music in the iTunes library, you'll be able to search for and select it by artist, song, album, genre, or playlist. I suspect you'll be able to figure out how to set up playlists though, and moving music from one place to another (e.g. to add it to a playlist) is just a matter of dragging and dropping.

[Merlin99 (Premo)]

Originally Posted by Tilted

I use AirPlay quite a bit. If I'm not mistaken though, the AirPlay-enabled receivers can only do audio streaming. Perhaps you can confirm that for me. I have an Apple TV box which allows me to use AirPlay to mirror most anything on any of my iOS devices (or Mac) to my TV. Or I can stream any media I have on any of those devices, from either of my computers (including my PC), or from my iCloud accounts to the TV or stereo system - movies, videos, pictures, music. That box is something like a Roku, but it doesn't offer nearly as many 'channels'. It has Netflix, YouTube, Hulu Plus and a few others - but the main benefit of it is the AirPlay functionality.

As for your moving from CDs to iTunes, I did that myself a couple of years ago. I had several thousand CDs but only a small portion of them were ripped into my iTunes library (to listen to on the computer or load on MP3 players that I had). When iTunes Match was introduced I decided to rip my entire CD library and not be bothered with CDs at all anymore. It doesn't require much effort, but if you have a lot of CDs it will take a while.

I would recommend that you go into Preferences in iTunes and, under the General tab, select Import CD and Eject where it asks When you insert a CD. I would also check that box that says Automaticaly retrieve CD track names from internet. Once you've done that, all you need to do is insert one CD after the other and iTunes will do the rest for you. Whenever I was using my computer for other reasons, I'd have a case of CDs nearby and insert a new one when I noticed it eject the previous one. The process didn't need to consume much of my attention. And if most of your CDs are normal store bought ones, it will be able to pull the track names for you and fill in much of the meta data about each song / album. Every now and then it will find a CD it doesn't know and you'll have to go back and fill in the song names yourself. It can also pull track names for homemade CDs, but not as reliably.

You can also add any music you happen to already have on your computer to the iTunes library - digital purchases you may have made from somewhere else (e.g. Amazon) or MP3 files you got from other sources. One of the pulldown menus will have an Add to Library… option. When you're adding music you have elsewhere on your computer, you can decide to have iTunes make a copy of it and place that copy in its file directory or, in effect, just make a note of where it is so it can use it when it needs to.

Before you rip all your CDs you might want to tinker with the encoding method / quality settings. Under Preferences > General > Import Settings you'll find a number of options. You can rip songs as AAC files, AIFF files, MP3 files, WAV files, or Apple Lossless files. For most of those you can also adjust the bit rate. I use AAC files and the iTunes Plus default bit rate (256 kbs). The quality is pretty good and the files still don't take up too much space. However, if you don't want to sacrifice any quality - especially if you'll be playing your music at a decent volume - you might want to try Apple Lossless. That will eat up a lot of storage space, and if you're streaming it over WiFi while other people are loading the WiFi network you may experience some lag. My recommendation would be to rip a few CDs as Apple Lossless and as, e.g., AAC and compare how they sound through your stereo (compare them blindly if possible ). You can then decide if the quality difference is noticeable and meaningful enough to you. If you rip everything as Apple Loseless, you can always go back and convert those files to AAC.

From there, I'm not sure what else you're interested in doing / knowing. I use iTunes Match myself, but that might not be too useful for you if you only have 1 iOS device - you can probably just load whatever music you want on the iPad. If you have specific questions about what's possible or how to do it, feel free to ask.


EDIT: There's also a setting in iTunes under Preferences > Store that will allow it to automatically retrieve the artwork for the CDs you import. It doesn't always find it automatically, but it does more often than not. And I should have mentioned playlists, you'll most likely want to make some of those (e.g. christmas music, party music, rock). Once you have the music in the iTunes library, you'll be able to search for and select it by artist, song, album, genre, or playlist. I suspect you'll be able to figure out how to set up playlists though, and moving music from one place to another (e.g. to add it to a playlist) is just a matter of dragging and dropping.

One problem with this though is their Apple device is an IPad, no CD player.

[Tilted (Premo)]

Originally Posted by Merlin99

One problem with this though is their Apple device is an IPad, no CD player.

He asked about going from CDs to iTunes, so I assume he understands that he needs something with a CD drive to rip the music off the CDs. He can use any computer with a CD drive to do that, it needn't be a Mac (I was still primarily using a Windows device when I ripped all of mine). If he doesn't already have iTunes on it, he can download it fairly easily. Once the music is on the computer, he can stream it from there to his stereo (using the iPad to remotely control it) or he can load it onto the iPad and stream it from the iPad to the stereo. (Or he can use iTunes Match to store it in iCloud and stream it to any device he wants whenever he wants over an internet connection.)

There are other ways of getting music on the iPad or computer, but I took him as wanting to use iTunes to use the CDs he already owns. If he meant he wanted to go from CDs to iTunes as in, use iTunes to buy all of his music and forget about the CDs, he can do that as well - from the iPad or from a computer. But, if he already has a fair amount of music, I can't imagine he'd want to buy it all again.

[itsbob]

You're right as to what I was looking for and figured iTunes was key, and already have it on our Dell laptop.

Sooooo the next question is how to go from there to the iPad. Did download something called airplayit. Not sure if that's the answer or not.

[Tilted (Premo)]

Originally Posted by itsbob

You're right as to what I was looking for and figured iTunes was key, and already have it on our Dell laptop.

Sooooo the next question is how to go from there to the iPad. Did download something called airplayit. Not sure if that's the answer or not.

There are a number of ways to get stuff onto the iPad, but if you're looking to move your music library from the computer onto it I think the best way is to plug it into your computer and use iTunes to just sync the music.

In Preferences > Devices I have Prevent iPods, iPhones, and iPads from syncing automatically checked. That way I know that devices won't sync automatically if / when I plug them in. I like to make sure they only do what I what (in terms of syncing / backing up) what them to when I want them to. When you plug the iPad it will ask you if you want to register it and blah, blah, blah... you can skip that stuff if you want. Then they'll be tabs across the top of the screen that allow you to set what you do and don't want to sync - Apps, Music, Movies, Books, etc. By default they should all be set to not sync, but you may want to confirm that.

Then you can go into the Music tap and check the box to allow it to sync that. You can either choose to sync your entire music library as it is, or to sync only selected music. If you choose the later, it will give you the option to select whichever playlists you want, artists you want, genres you want or albums you want. Before I starting using Match, I just had a few playlists that contained all the music I wanted on my devices and I would select those to sync. Once they're selected, iTunes will always just sync those lists and whatever music you've moved in or out of them. I think you can also manually drop and drag music that you want to load on the iPad, but that's only convenient if you're just trying to add a couple of songs or albums.

On the summary page, you can select whether or not you want the iPad to back up to that computer or not. You can also select Sync with this iPad over WiFi. If you choose that you won't have to plug the iPad in to directly transfer music (or anything else) to it in the future - if the computer can see it in the WiFi network, it will wirelessly move stuff back and forth or back it up.

If you just want to stream music from the computer over AirPlay, there's an app called Remote that will allow you to control iTunes on your computer from the iPad.

[GURPS (Premo)]

Originally Posted by Tilted

Before you rip all your CDs you might want to tinker with the encoding method / quality settings. Under Preferences > General > Import Settings you'll find a number of options. You can rip songs as AAC files, AIFF files, MP3 files, WAV files, or Apple Lossless files.

if you do not need to play your Audio Tracks elsewhere - like your car radio - yes some car radios can utilize a thumb drive w/MP3's

just ripe to the default AAC at, at least 128kpbs, but 256 is better

[GURPS (Premo)]

Originally Posted by Tilted

If you just want to stream music from the computer over AirPlay, there's an app called Remote that will allow you to control iTunes on your computer from the iPad.

Couldn't Bob just turn on 'sharing' in iTunes and have it pop up ? on the Airtunes device ?

[Tilted (Premo)]

Originally Posted by GURPS

Couldn't Bob just turn on 'sharing' in iTunes and have it pop up ? on the Airtunes device ?

If you're streaming music to the Apple TV (and then a stereo), then it's easy to control that music (switch songs, playlists, etc.) right from the Apple TV. I don't know that AirPlay enabled receivers / speakers (e.g. those made by other companies) have an interface for controlling the music though. You can still stream the music from iTunes on your computer, but you'd need to use the computer to control the music. The Remote app should let you do it with an iPad, iPhone, or iPod Touch.

[Tilted (Premo)]

Originally Posted by GURPS

if you do not need to play your Audio Tracks elsewhere - like your car radio - yes some car radios can utilize a thumb drive w/MP3's

just ripe to the default AAC at, at least 128kpbs, but 256 is better

I wouldn't rip at anything less than 256kps myself. Even still, you can hear a difference between that and Loseless - particularly through a real stereo system. Some people really want the best sound quality they can get.