The iPod & iTunes Pocket Guide, Second Edition

The iPod & iTunes Pocket Guide80

iPod, you’ll see entries for Audio, Video, Photos, Other

(read: data like fi les you’ve copied to the iPod, notes,

contacts, and calendars), and Free Space. Click the

gauge, and the display cycles through amounts of

storage used by each kind of media (measured in

GB and MB); the numbers of items of each kind of

media (7,660 songs, 109 videos, and 6,098 photos,

for example); and how long it would take to play the

audio and video fi les (26.6 days, for example).

Figure 3.8 The

Capacity gauge.

Here’s how the panes shake out.

Summary

In iTunes 7, the Summary pane provides such details

about your iPod as its name, capacity, software

version number, serial number, and format. It also

will tell you the version of the iPod software it’s

running and offer you the option to update that

software if newer software is available or restore

your iPod (essentially, erase its contents and give it a

new operating system). I’ll cover the ins and outs of

restoring your iPod in Chapter 8.

Finally, the Summary tab offers these options.

Open iTunes When This iPod Is Connected

Most likely, you’re going to want to sync or other-

wise muck with your iPod when you plug it into

Chapter 3: iTunes and You 81

your computer. This option saves you the trouble of

launching iTunes manually.

Only Sync Checked Items

This provides fi ne control over which fi les you sync

to the iPod. Checking the box for this option lets

you prevent fi les from loading onto the iPod by

unchecking the small check boxes next to their

names in playlists and Library lists.

tip

Care to check or uncheck all the songs in a playlist at

the same time? On the Mac, hold down the Command

key and click any check box in the playlist. In Windows,

hold down the Control key and do the same thing.

When you uncheck a box, all boxes will be unchecked;

check a box, and all boxes will be checked.

Manually Manage Music (and Videos,

on 5G iPods)

This small option offers a lot of power. To understand

its usefulness, it’s helpful to know that by default,

when you sync iTunes and the iPod, iTunes moves

only the fi les you ask it for onto the iPod and erases

everything else from the device. This can be a real

bother if you’ve moved your iPod from one computer

to another, and the contents of the second computer

don’t match those of the fi rst.

Managing fi les manually allows you to add music

(and videos, for compatible iPods) to your iPod

without erasing any other media. When you select

this option, all the playlists on your iPod appear

below the iPod’s icon in the iTunes Source list. (For

The iPod & iTunes Pocket Guide82

the sake of simplicity, we’ll say that the Music,

Movies, TV Shows, Podcasts, and Audiobooks entries

count as playlists.)

To add media fi les to the iPod manually, just select

them in one of iTunes’ playlists, and drag them to the

iPod’s icon in the Source list or to one of the iPod’s

standard (not Smart) playlists (Figure 3.9). You can

also drag fi les from your computer’s desktop directly

to the iPod, which copies the media to the iPod but

not to your iTunes Library.

Figure 3.9

Moving music

to the iPod

manually.

Optionally, you can add songs by genre, artist, or

album by using iTunes’ browser. To do so, follow

these steps:

1. In iTunes, choose Edit > Show Browser

(Command-B in Mac OS X; Ctrl+B in Windows).

A pane divided into Genre, Artist, and Album

columns appears at the top of iTunes’ main

window.

2. Click an entry in one of the columns.

If you want to copy all the Kate Bush songs in

your iTunes Library to the iPod, for example, click

Ms. Bush’s name in the Artist column. To copy all

the reggae tunes to the iPod, select Reggae in the

Genre column.