- To add music to your iPod you first have to add music to your digital library, obviously. Apple would love if your only source of music was through downloading songs through their iTunes Music Store, but that's only one of many options. Recently, most digital stores have finally removed any trace of Digital Rights Managed software tying the purchased songs to one particular device or software, allowing for your digital music to become truly portable between applications. Other ways to add music would be to import existing CDs into your music library via iTunes. There are even ways of transferring old vinyl albums into the digital MP3 format. There are otherwise obvious ways of obtaining music, but due to the legality of things information regarding such tactics must be obtained elsewhere.
- Apple designed the iPod and iTunes to work seamlessly and automatically together. Steve Jobs, CEO of Apple, once told Fortune Magazine, "Plug it in. Whirrrr. Done." Adding music via iTunes is simply a matter of setting up the iPod in the iTune's Devices sidebar, selecting the playlists you want to sync and waiting for it to finish. Each time you plug your iPod in again, it will automatically sync the updated playlists. If automatic sync doesn't do it for you and you want to be a little bit more picky and choosy about which songs to transfer over, there is an option to manually manage the music on your iPod via iTunes. This option can be checked by going to the Summary tab while the iPod is connected to the computer and iTunes is running. This option allows you to drag individual songs or groups of songs and drop them onto the iPod in the sidebar and it then transfers the selected music, no more no less.
- Other options are available to add music to your iPod, though none as seamless as iTunes. Lifehacker.com reports of a cross-platform program called Floola. To use Floola, you're first going to enable your iPod for disk use by checking off the option under the Summary/Info tab on the device in iTunes. This allows you to use and access your iPod as if it were an external hard drive. Download the application and drag it to your iPod--In Finder or Windows Explorer, not iTunes--double click it to run. Floola has an interface that slightly resembles iTunes and adding music and video is as simple as dragging music into the Floola digital music manager. The benefit of Floola over iTunes is that you can run this program on any computer the iPod is connected to and transferring music from another computer is just as seamless or copying songs back to a computer, all of which is severely or completely limited with the iTunes application.
- With the retraction of DRM from almost all digital music stores, the flood gates opened for iPod owners to choose their store of choice when looking to fill their iPod rather than remaining in Apple's walled garden. AmazonMP3 Store offers nearly the same catalog as iTunes and retains roughly the same pricing structure. The downloads come in MP3 format and can work with any digital music player. Other such stores offering pure MP3 downloads include Napster, Rhapsody and eMusic. eMusic specializes in independent music, while Napster and Rhapsody offer MP3 downloads as well as subscription plans allowing access to their full music catalog for $5 to $15 a month. Unfortunately these subscription plans don't work with the iPod, but the MP3 downloads do. Rhapsody is in the process of working on an iPhone/iPod Touch application though that will allow you to browse the catalog from your handheld device.
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