Importing music from iTunes and GarageBand
A movie is nothing without its soundtrack. Can you imagine the plastic bag scene in American Beauty without Thomas Newman's haunting piano in the background? Or Luke Skywalker's epic lightsaber battle with Darth Vader in Return of the Jedi without John Williams' score?
Many of us have hundreds or thousands of tunes in our iTunes libraries today and a few of us, with the gift to craft music, probably have a number of projects in progress in GarageBand. Final Cut Pro X makes it simple to import either into your videos.
How to do it...
1. Click on the Show/Hide Sound Browser button on the right of the tool bar. The Sound Browser appears split into two sections. The first lists what sources we have to select from. GarageBand and iTunes should be listed:
2. Click on iTunes. Your entire music library appears in the bottom half of the window. You can narrow down the list by either clicking on the disclosure triangle to the left of the iTunes label and selecting a playlist, or by typing in the search box at the bottom of the browser window:
3. When you have found the song you want, you can click on the song title and drag it into your open project, dropping it wherever you choose. If you drag it to the end of a project, it will add it to the primary storyline. If you drag it below any clips along your timeline, it will connect itself to that clip as a connected clip (read more about the connected clip in the Creating connected clips recipe).
4. Click on GarageBand in the Sound Browser. Just like clicking on iTunes, you will see a list of any GarageBand projects you have been working on. The only pre-requisite is that you have saved an
iLife Previewof the file (you are prompted to do this when saving and closing a new GarageBand project for the first time). Just like with an iTunes track, click-and-drag the music file you want into your project.
How it works...
When you drag an audio file directly into a project, a duplicate of the file is added to the project's default event (set when you originally created the project). That means, even if you delete the song from iTunes or GarageBand, it will still work fine in your project. In addition, any compressed audio files you import from iTunes automatically get converted into uncompressed WAV files, which FCPX handles more smoothly than typically compressed MP3 and AAC files.
There's more...
Import now, use later
If your project hasn't really taken shape yet, but you know you want to import music from the Sound Browser to use later, you don't have to drag a song or sound effects directly into the timeline. Instead, simply click-and-drag them from the Sound Browser to the event of your choice in your Event Library. They will copy into the event and stay there until you are ready to use them. You can also apply keywords and make them favorites as well!
Tons of sound effects
If you haven't done so already, run your Mac's Software Update. A download titled Final Cut Pro X Supplemental Content should appear that will install more than 1,300 high-quality sound effects that can be accessed in the Sound Browser. Additionally, it will download extra presets for the Space Designer plugin, covered in the Creating a surround sound space recipe.
See also
Clicking and dragging is easy, but not always the fastest or most accurate way to add a file to a project's timeline. Read the Creating connected clips, Appending, inserting, and overwriting clips to a storyline recipes in Chapter 3, Basic Editing Mechanics to learn about the different types of edits in FCPX and how to use keyboard shortcuts to quickly add clips (both video and audio) to your timeline in different ways.
