Manually Managing Your Music

Manually Managing your music is an extremely useful and incredibly underutilized capability of your iPod and iTunes. First off, what does this function do? Setting your iPod/iTunes to Manually Manage Music will open up a whole new level of flexibility for you and your iPod. What it enables you to do is to drag and drop music from your iTunes library to your iPod, and to delete individual songs directly from your iPod, without having to deal with playlists. Also, of even more importance to most people is the ability to drag and drop music from iTunes on other computers. Without Manually Manage Music selected you cannot transfer music from another iTunes library without first erasing everything on your iPod and then reloading everything from the new computer. With manually manage music enabled you can add music from computer A, unplug your iPod, connected it to computers B and C, and add music from each of those libraries as well. This function is extremely useful for those with 80 or 160gig iPods and lots of friends or iTunes libraries spread out over several computers (home and office for example). To turn on this feature (which is turned off by default), follow these directions…

If you have iTunes 7 or later follow these instructions:

1. Connect iPod to your computer.
2. Open iTunes.
3. Select iPod in the source pane. If you don’t see iPod in the iTunes source pane, then click here if you use Windows or if you use Mac OS X click here.
4. On the Summary tab select “Manually manage music and videos” and click Apply.
5. Tip: Even though your Music, Movies, and TV Shows tabs show no checkmarks when you are in Manual mode, you can still sync content. Checking these boxes will place the iPod back into Automatic mode..

At this point you can drag and drop from multiple computers with impunity! Enjoy!