Adding a CD insert to iTunes

I have been digitizing all of my phonograph records, my cassette tapes, and my reel-to-reel tapes and saving them into iTunes. One of the things that I really wanted to be able to do was to save the liner notes in iTunes. It is now possible to do that. You simply have to scan the liner notes and create a PDF file from your scan.

How To Do It

• If you are working with a CD insert, once you have scanned the insert, save the file as a PDF-type file where you can find it again.
• Open iTunes.
• Go to the File menu of iTunes and from there to the Add to Library… submenu

• Find the PDF file that you created and open it

Once you do that, it is saved in the Book section of iTunes.

• In the left panel of iTunes under Library, highlight the Books item.
• Make sure you have the List tab selected at the top
• Then you will see in the main window on the right the list of the books that you have in iTunes.

• Highlight the PDF file that you saved by clicking on it once.
• Press Command-I or go to the File menu of iTunes and from there go to the Get Info submenu to bring up the "Get info" window for your selection.
• Click on the Options tab.
• Under Media Kind: change it from Book to Music and then click OK

Make the CD Insert a part of the Album

The next thing you need to do is to go to the Info tab of the "Get info" window and make sure that the name of the artist and of the album are all correct and match the information you entered for the individual songs. This is so iTunes recognizes the PDF as an element of the same album as the songs.

• Go to your iTunes Music Library
• Find the PDF file in the iTunes Music Library. One way to do that is to select the Songs tab at the top and look for the PDF file by its name.
• Make sure your PDF file has the correct Album title. It has to match the Album title used for the songs exactly.

Now go to Album view and find the album you have been working on. If you just see one album, click on it to open it and see its contents. You should see your CD Insert listed at the end of the list of songs. If instead you see two Albums with the same name, you need to do a little bit more work to make the CD insert a part of the same album as the music.

If the artist is the same for all of the songs, choose your CD Insert inside the Album in which it appears and bring up the "Get info" window for your selection. Select the Info tab. Type the artist name in the "Artist" field. When you close the "Get info" window and return to the Album view in iTunes, you should now only see one album.

If the artist is not the same for all of the songs,

• Select the Album with the CD Insert. Press Command-I or go to the File menu of iTunes and from there go to the Get Info submenu to bring up the "Get info" window for your selection.
• Choose the Info tab.
• At the bottom, check the "Part of a compilation" check box.
• Select the other Album with the songs. Bring up the "Get info" window for the Album.
• Select the Options tab.
• In the middle change "Part of a compilation" to "Yes". iTunes will go through all of the songs and change them to be "part of the compilation".

Now with the Albums tab selected at the top, scroll down to the album that you have been working on. There should now only be one Album. Once you have made the PDF part of the album, it will appear at the bottom of the song list with a little book icon after the name. If you double click on the icon, the CD insert will open up in Preview or your default PDF reader.


It is a little bit of work, but now all the information that came along with your album will be right there with the list of songs in iTunes.