[fishbulb]

Hey guys. I'm a proud owner of a new macbook pro. What I have done is transferred all of my mp3s from my old PC to my new MBP via external hard drive. Everything copied fine to the MBP, but I just have a few questions. I'm used of winamp (opening the mp3 files and they play). When I open up my mp3s now, I know it goes into iTunes, but what exactly is happening? Is it duplicating my mp3 files? I know I am able to delete the files from the iTunes library without deleting the actual file. Do most people just import their entire mp3 collection into iTunes? Say I do import my entire collection. Is it then okay to delete all of the original mp3s. Someone please explain! Thanks.

[christm]

1. When you open music it imports it and keeps a copy of it on the computers hd (unless told otherwise.e.g. ext hd)

2. Its a copy to play in itunes so its not reading off what you copied say to the desktop from your old pc.

3. I would highly HIGHLY reccomend keeping a backup of the music and if you delete the original files and itunes crashes and looses it all (extremly unlikely) then you have nothing.

hope this helps

chris.

[fishbulb]

Thanks for the response. So basically it's making a copy of all my music just for iTunes. Won't that take up a lot more HD space? Is it just me, or is that kind of stupid?

[tootallUK]

Originally Posted by fishbulb

Thanks for the response. So basically it's making a copy of all my music just for iTunes. Won't that take up a lot more HD space? Is it just me, or is that kind of stupid?

Well... a back-up copy does what it says on the tin... it's a copy, just in case computer or human error ends up deleting one. So, yes, if you have a copy, it will need twice the space.

I have my back-up on a seperate external HD. In fact, as I have an iBook with a reasonably meagre HD, the entire original iTunes library is now also on a smaller firewire 100GB external HD, so that the iBook still does other things.

Oh, and on a 60GB iPod...

Not really as anal as it sounds. Honest!