As you can tell from the last chapter, iTunes is an important part of your iPad experience. Even if you use the airy offerings of iCloud to back up, match, or re-download your music, iTunes converts tracks from your own CDs to iPad-ready digital files. It also lets you organize your media library locally on your computer—no Internet connection necessary. And if you don’t use iCloud, iTunes brokers the transfer of songs, music, videos, books, personal info, and apps between your computer and tablet.

If you’ve never had an iPod or iPhone before you got your iPad, you may not know what a powerful media jukebox iTunes is. As this chapter explains, you can customize its look, make playlists in all kinds of ways, change a song’s file format, adjust each song’s equalizer settings, and even keep your iTunes library on an external drive for safekeeping.