Noob iTunes question

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.

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.

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?

fishbulb said:

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?

Click to expand...

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!