With modern CDs that have text data in addition to music data, when you
load the CD into iTunes it reads the composer, album title, artist,
recording date, track titles, genre, etc. These also download into the
iPod. Then, when you listen to the iPod, you can choose to listen to a
particular album, or a particular artist, or a particular genre. It's
really quite wonderful.
In addition, within iTunes on your computer you can create "playlists."
The playlists are downloaded to the iPod and then you can choose to play
the particular sequence of songs according to the playlist you created.
If a song is contained in more than one playlist, the song is loaded to
the iPod only once. Therefore, one song on the iPod could be accessed
by album, artist, genre, playlist(s), etc.
If you are digitizing vinyl recordings, or some very early CD's that
don't contain any text data, you can manually enter that stuff into
iTunes. It's not hard, it just takes the time to write it in. iTunes
presents a form for you to fill out for each song/track for which you
want to establish the data. You can fill in parts and leave others
blank if you want.
I have to say I am very favorably impressed with my iPod and with
iTunes. Also, I did not buy a big iPod. I bought the iPod Nano. One
reason for that is because it has flash memory rather than a hard drive.
My whole family got Nanos from me for Christmas, and expecially for my
son and daughter, college students who treat their equipment fairly
roughly, I thought the hard drive might be damaged if they drop the
iPod. As it turns out, I have dropped my iPod fairly often. I don't
know if this is truly a concern or not (hard drive ruggedness) but I
drop my iPod more often than I like to admit. It usually gets pulled
off my desk or night stand when I move while wearing head phones. Once
when riding my bike to work it fell out of my coat pocket and skidded
along the blacktop for several yards. I keep it in the case it comes
with, and so far it has not been damaged.
Anyway, my iTunes library now has about 600 "songs" on it, and I
currently have about 375 of those on the iPod. It is not obvious to me
for the way I use the iPod that I would need a high capacity unit
because I like having a subset I can shuffle between for a while, then
modify, switch, update the subset. Depending on your usage, you'll have
to decide whether to spring the bucks for a high-capacity unit. For me,
even 2GB is okay.
Michael D. Edmiston, Ph.D.
Professor of Chemistry and Physics
Bluffton University
Bluffton, OH 45817
(419)-358-3270
edmiston@bluffton.edu