iPod for Newbies (Part 1)

So my friend joined the digital music evolution when she recently got her first iPod. It got me thinking about stuff a new iPod user should know or should do. I thought of several things that I’ll cover in a span of posts. For now, we’ll start off with…

Import your collection. Now that you got your Pod, you need to fill it up with tunes. Start with your collection of music CDs. Import aka “rip” them into iTunes so that they will sync with your iPod. Me, I was originally importing my stuff in the MP3 format but eventually switched to the AAC format. I’m going with the newer is better idea. I also increase the bitrate of imports from 128 kbps to 192 kbps. Since you can’t “make up” quality after the fact, importing songs at a higher quality is more reassuring to me.

Get album art. With your mass collection of 80’s CDs imported, wouldn’t it be great to have the CD artwork associated with the tracks, especially for you Nano and video iPod owners? You know you want to see the cover art of A-ha as Take On Me plays on your Pod. You can find decent quality images of album art on Amazon and using Google Images. Follow these instructions to paste the image onto single or multiple tracks in iTunes. You used to be able to get high quality album art directly from the iTunes Music Store (iTMS) using iTunes Album Art search sites, but Apple recently caught on and disabled this feature.

New music Tuesday. Another way to get songs for your iPod is to get them from iTMS. Every Tuesday, new music is released on-line that you can purchase and download. Additionally, there’s always one free music selection. Most times, there are two songs you can get for absolutely free. Once in awhile you get a gem like Daniel Powter’s Bad Day (August 2005), and a lot of times, the free songs are pretty good. Another way of finding out what’s freely available on iTMS for that week is to visit Free iTunes Downloads. This site tracks the free releases including videos and other audio content like course material from Berkeley. Even better, you can subscribe to their RSS feed and get notified of updates that way. Other web sites like O’Reilly blogs post updates of the free offerings on iTMS as well.

Okay, enough for now. Upcoming posts will cover finding tunes you heard on TV shows or movies, listening to your iPod while driving, backing up your music, and using an iPod utility.

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