iPod and iTunes: The Missing Manual, Third Edition

Transferring Music to the iPod Shuffle

Moving music to the iPod Shuffle is just as easy as moving it onto a regular iPod (Chapter 2), and depending on your level of fussiness about what exactly goes onto your iPod Shuffle, the music transfer can be even easier.

Like all iPods before it, the Shuffle was designed to work with Apple’s iTunes software. If you’re unfamiliar with iTunes or need a refresher course in ripping songs into the digital tracks that iPods love, skip ahead to Chapter 5 to read all about it. Tracks you’ve purchased from Audible.com (Chapter 6) or the iTunes Music Store (Chapter 7) also work on the Shuffle.

The iPod Shuffle wasn’t designed to be a complete repository for all your digital music. Because you can only store either 512 megabytes or 1 gigabyte of music at a time on the Shuffle, it’s more like a short-range player that’s there to provide you with a several-hours-of-life soundtrack between computer breaks.

But just as you can choose to let the iPod automatically mix up your songs or play them in the order you arranged them, you can also let the Shuffle pick a random sampling of tunes from your iTunes library—or you can manually transfer precisely the tracks you want to take with you.

Loading Music the Automatic Way

You can’t autosync your entire multi-gigabyte music library to your Shuffle, but you can Autofill your iStick with iTunes 4.7.1 (or later). Once you plug your player into the computer and iTunes recognizes it, a small panel appears at the bottom ...