How to Add Files to iTunes Quickly

If you're an iTunes user who downloads music from all over the web, you're probably familiar with an annoying task of manually opening iTunes and dragging and dropping your downloads into the library window. It's a pain especially on older computers where iTunes takes forever to load. But if you don’t stay on top of it, you end up having all of your new music that you're excited about sitting in your browsers download folder instead of loading into iTunes and your iPod. Well after eight versions of iTunes, I'm excited to tell you that version 9 finally gives uses a way to quickly add their music and video downloads to the iTunes library without having to launch any programs. Granted just about every other juke box program in the world ahs offered a feature like this for years now but that doesn’t make the feature any less monumental for iPod and iPhone owners who pretty much depend on iTunes. So how do you do it? First step, make sure you're running version 9 of iTunes which you can always grab form cnetdownload.com. next, find your iTunes music folder. On a PC, this is typically found by going to My Documents folder, then My Music, iTunes and then iTunes music. For Mac users, select the music directory from the finder window sidebar then iTunes and iTunes music. If the folder is sorted alphabetically, it shouldn’t be too hard to spot a folder labeled automatically add to iTunes sitting near the top. Now, when you add music or video files to this particular folder, iTunes will automatically import the content the next time you launch the program. But as you can tell, this folder isn’t in the most convenient spot. So I'm going to show you a few tricks to make things easier. One technique that works in both Mac and PC is to right click on the folder and make an alias or short cut that you can drag to your desktop. For PC users, you can also open the folder and add it to your list of favorites or drag and drop the folder or the shirt cut for the folder down to the quick launch bar. For Mac users, try dragging the folder down to the dock or to the finder sidebar. So there you go, hopefully this tip will save you some time and help keep your media library all neatly loaded into iTunes. For cnet.com, I'm Donald Bell.