Ipod Nano/Music questions

First and foremost, Mrry Christmas to all!!! I hope everyone is having a great holiday.


I got an Ipod Nano from SWMBO. I downloaded Itunes, and I tried to rip some CD's. It won't rip them, it'll only play them in real time and then it puts the song, one by excrutiating one into my music library. Is this an Apple thing where they want this to happen so that you'll buy the CD from them to make the process faster? Or am I missing something?

Also, what are the current programs that people are using to share music? I really don't want to pay for all the music for my Ipod. I haven't had the best of luck in the past with sharing music as everytime I have done so, it always ended up with me getting a virus. Anyone else ever get a virus from sharing files? And if not, how do you protect your computer from these nasties?

Really? If I pop a CD into my computer, iTunes will play it in real time but usually have the whole thing ripped by the end of the first track. I'm going to poke around in my preferences to see if there's anything that could make it act like you described.

Alright. My suggestion would be to see what speed it imports them if you turn off "play cd while importing".

In terms of sharing, which I'm going to assume is legal for you like it is for me: if you're sensible and prefer your music by the album, get a bittorrent client like Azureus and use a torrent search engine (I use torrentscan, it's an aggregator). It's fast, you get whole albums, there's a lot available, and you know precisely what you are getting. I've downloaded ~50GB of music with bittorrent, and other than badly tagged files I've never had a problem.

Well, you can definitely play your CDs by ripping them and then Itunes automatically converts it to the AAC format (or whatever it is they use) for playing on your Ipod. I'll also look in itunes (the kids have the regular Ipods) to see if I can check the settings.

As far as file sharing, I used to do that. However, I learned it was illegal to share copyrighted material, so I don't do it any more. Back before I realized it, though, I used Limewire. It seemed to work really well and still works for me for non-copyrighted material. I have a virus program that seems to work ok, and have never had a problem.

Firstly, I urge people NOT to purchase songs from iTunes - they're locked in a way that prevents you, the buyer, from moving your music around freely with a scheme called "DRM". You can read more about the impact of DRM and the opposition to it at http://www.defectivebydesign.org/what_is_drm

As far as music sharing, I stick to torrents. Applications that use Gnutella (Like LimeWire and Kazaa) and eMule (eDonkey) have quickly become crap.

As to viruses... Well, I'm not much help there, I run GNU/Linux.