Creating an iTunes Music Library

As your learned back in Chapter 2, "Getting Started with an iPod," and will read in each of the following two chapters, you manage the music that you store on your iPod within the iTunes application. The iTunes Library and the playlists you create within iTunes are the sources of music that you listen to with an iPod. The two general steps to creating these music sources are to build your iTunes Library and to create iTunes playlists.

Note

Throughout this chapter, I assume that you have a good working knowledge of iTunes, hopefully from reading Part II, "iTunes." If you haven't read Part II of this book yet, you need to at least read Chapter 11, "Touring iTunes," and Chapter 12, "Getting Started with iTunes," so you understand the very basics of the application. However, the process of managing your iPod's music library will be much better if you have read Chapters 11 through 16 before reading through the rest of this chapter.

Building an iTunes Music Library

You can get music for your iTunes Library from three main sources: your audio CDs, the iTunes Music Store, and the Internet. Although the specific steps you use to add music from these various sources to your Library are a bit different, the end result is the same. Your iTunes Library will contain all the music in your collection.

I don't provide the details of building and managing an iTunes Library here because Part II of this book is dedicated to iTunes and provides all the information you need to use this excellent application. The chapters that specifically focus on building your Library are Chapter 14, "Building, Browsing, Searching, and Playing Your iTunes Music Library," and Chapter 15, "Labeling, Categorizing, and Configuring Your Music," but you'll also want to read Chapters 11 through 13 to install and learn to use iTunes.

Note

Remember that there is one special playlist, called the On-The-Go playlist, that you can create on the iPod. You can save these playlists on your iPod and then transfer them to your iTunes Music Library when you update your iPod.

Creating iTunes Playlists

From the earlier chapters in this part of the book, you learned that the playlists stored within iTunes are transferred to your iPod so that you can listen to them. You create and manage these playlists within iTunes. Chapter 16, "Creating, Configuring, and Using Playlists," provides an in-depth look at playlists and gives you all the information you need to create and manage your playlists.