MacBook Air Portable Genius, 4th Edition

Synchronizing with an iPod, iPad, or iPhone

Long gone are the days when the only thing you could use to fill up your portable media player was music. With modern iPods, iPads, iPhones, and the latest version of iTunes, you can cram your players not only with your favorite tunes but also with music videos, audiobooks, movies, TV shows, e-books, podcasts, photos, contacts, calendars, and even games. Suddenly those once-massive multigigabyte hard drives don’t look so big anymore. Whatever your device’s hard drive size, if you find yourself running out of space, the alternative isn’t (necessarily) to go out and buy a bigger player. Instead, iTunes gives you many options for controlling what gets added to (or removed from) your iPod, iPad, or iPhone when you synchronize it.

If iTunes doesn’t fire up automatically when you connect your device, you can force it to do so. In iTunes, click your iPod, iPad, or iPhone in the Devices list, click the Summary tab, and then select the Open iTunes when this device is connected check box, where device is iPod, iPad, or iPhone. Click Apply to put the setting into effect.

Synchronizing music and videos

An iOS device — whether it’s an iPod, iPad, or iPhone — is a digital music player, so you probably load up yours with a lot of audio content. Depending on the type of iOS device you have, you may have a lot of music videos stored on it as well. ...