How to Play CD Tracks in iTunes

9 of 11 in Series: The Essentials of Setting Up and Playing Content in iTunes

You can use iTunes to play the songs on a CD. If you don’t want to rip music CDs and store the tracks in your iTunes library, you can still use iTunes to play tracks right off the CD without importing them.

Just insert any music CD — or even a CD-R that someone burned for you — into your computer. After you insert the CD, iTunes displays a dialog box that asks whether you want to import the CD into your library right now. Click Yes or No, depending on whether or not you want the CD info imported. Either way, click the Play button and iTunes plays your CD.

View CD track info after iTunes consults the Internet.

If you’re connected to the Internet, iTunes accesses the Gracenote CDDB for song information while you are answering the import question, so that after you click Yes or No, iTunes presents the track information for each song automatically, as shown here. (Gracenote CDDB is a song database on the Internet that knows the track names of most commercial CDs but not homemade-mix CDs.)