Absolute Beginner's Guide to iPod and iTunes

To determine how you are going to have to manage the music on your iPod, you need to understand how large your music collection is and how much storage space is available on your iPod. This information will determine the way in which you build and maintain your iPod's music library.

Determining the Size of Your iTunes Library

You can determine how much storage space you need to move your entire music collection in just a few steps. Open iTunes. Select Library in the Source list. With the Browser open, select All in the Genre or Artist column. The iTunes window will show all the music you have placed in your Library. Look at the Source Information area at the bottom of the iTunes window (see Figure 6.1). Here, you will see the number of songs, the total playing time, and the disk space required to store all the music in your Library. The number you should be most interested in is the disk space required because that is what you use to determine whether all your music can fit onto your iPod's disk.

Determining How Much Storage Space You Have on an iPod

You have three ways to determine how large the storage space is on your iPod.

One is to refer to the documentation that came with your iPod, or perhaps you can simply remember the size of iPod you purchased. At press time, the possibilities were about 4GB or 6GB for an iPod mini, 20GB or 60GB for an iPod, or 512MB or 1GB for an iPod shuffle. This method is easy and provides a pretty good estimate of the storage capability of your iPod.

If you can't remember or want to determine the disk space on an iPod or iPod mini more accurately, you can get this information directly from the iPod itself. To do this, select Main menu, Settings, About. On the resulting About menu, you'll see the capacity of your iPod's disk (see Figure 6.2).

The capacity shown on the About menu is the amount of storage space available for your music. Some space is required to store the files needed for the iPod to function; this is the reason the capacity you see will always be slightly less than the rated size of the iPod's disk.

You can also get information about the status of the iPod's disk by connecting it to your computer and selecting it on the Source list. Just above the Source Information area, you'll see information about the iPod's disk, including used space and free space (see Figure 6.3).