iPOD & ITUNES for Dummies Portable Edition

Chapter 3

Getting Songs into Your iPod

In This Chapter

• Browsing and previewing songs
• Buying and downloading songs
• Setting the importing preferences
• Ripping music from CDs
• Automatically syncing between iTunes and your iPod

With iTunes, you can put content on your iPod quickly and keep it synchronized every time you connect it. However, to put content on your iPod, you must first get it into your iTunes library.

Copyright law prohibits you from copying copyrighted content and selling it to someone else. With iTunes, however, you are allowed to make copies of music, movies, videos, audio books, and podcasts you own for your personal use, such as making backup copies on discs or hard drives, and using the content with as many iPods as you wish. However, you can't copy content from your iPod to your computer via iTunes. It's a one-way trip from iTunes to your iPod.

If you're like that guy in the movie Diner who couldn't stand to have his records misfiled, you'll love iTunes and its nice, neat file storage methods. For all content items, iTunes creates a folder named for the artist and then creates folders within the artist folder named for each album. These folders are stored in the iTunes Music folder unless you change your storage preferences. Content items purchased and downloaded from the iTunes Store are saved in this folder, as well as media files you drag to the iTunes window — which are copied into the iTunes Music folder without deleting the original files.

When you have ...