Your Mac can import music, store it, convert its formats, send it to other devices, and play it back. The iTunes program comes with the Mac and is its main tool for managing music. the See the Using iTunes article for specific how-tos.

You can buy music tracks from the iTunes Store over the Internet. These tracks are usable only on one computer unless you pay extra for "unlocked" tracks. I have not bought any music from the iTunes Store because of this Digital Rights Management (DRM) encryption, because if some accident erases my crypto keys, or Apple changes its rules, all the music I bought this way could become inaccessible.

You can also buy music online from Amazon; their tracks are not locked or encrypted. I have bought a few albums this way, and they work fine.

Importing Music From Your LPs and Tapes to the Mac

Suppose you have a bunch of music on vinyl records or cassette tapes, and you want to digitize it and be able to listen to it on the Mac, iPod, etc. You can pay to have this conversion done. I used cassettes2cds.com, now called  Reclaim Media, to convert 43 cassette tapes to CDs. They did a fine job. They also do LPs and I may try this out.

It is perfectly legal (in the US) to make a backup copy of media you have purchased. (Selling copies would not be legal.)

If you want to do it yourself, I found a  good article by Matt Neuburg on TidBits.com that explains the basic steps. To do the analog to digital conversion, you want a hardware box that attaches to your Mac: the built-in conversion in Macs and PCs is "poor."

I bought an  ART USB Phono Plus v2 but have not tried it out yet.

Listening to Microsoft Format

A few years ago, a friend wrote: "I have found that it is very hard to impossible to listen to music on Amazon or other similar sites. It always says I have to install a plug in and we don't have success doing that either. I am sure we are doing something wrong, but on an IBM style computer, you just click and listen."

I had the same problem. I tried installing RealPlayer on my computer, and I still couldn't listen to song previews in Amazon. Firefox recommends Flip4Mac, which hooks into QuickTime. You can  download it free from Microsoft. I downloaded the Flip4Mac component from Microsoft and installed it, and then I could play the Microsoft format. (Since then, Amazon has changed its song previews to use Flash.)