I like to think of myself as technically savvy, but I freely admit I have met my match.

I was in Chicago for American Thanksgiving and bought myself the 32 gig I-touch.

This is my first Ipod, and have dutifully downloaded I-tunes.

Here is my issue:

I want to add about 75 - 100 of my CD's to the I-touch, and I-tunes is confusing as hell!!!!
How do I set it up so that I can categorize the CD's? You know, with categories such as
Musicals, Pop, Rock, Christmas, Country etc. Right now it seems that everything goes to one
library, and just shows a list of all songs. I want to be able to see them by artist and title as well.

I-Tunes help is not helpfull at all, so if any of you have any hints or tips it would be greatly appreciated

Thanks

LKS, If you're trying to set up the folders before you load your CDs and have iTunes automatically put the right genre in the right folder, you can't. All your music will go into your music "library." After you've loaded your CDs, you can create "playlists" and move songs (drag & drop) to them. By the way, this drag & drop operation doesn't create duplicates of the music. It just duplicates the listing.

You can sort your music by artist, genre, whatever by clicking on the appropriate column headings. This also makes it easier to drag & drop a whole category to the playlist you choose, e.g., click on genre, select first listing for classical, hold down shift key, click on last listing under classical, and drag the whole highlighted section to your classical playlist.

Hope this was helpful.

Cheers!
Puschkin

itouch freaking rocks. the best ipod eva....

Well, I'm not sure if the process is the same on the iPod as the iPhone... though the iPhone is just an iPod with a phone added, so I would image it is. Take a look at this (assuming the process is the same) and it should help.

iTunes reads the information on the CD (artist, songs, etc.), it will automatically categorize it. However, I don't always agree, or it doesn't fit my categories, but it's easy to change. Plus you can create your own categories if you don't like theirs. That's in addition to creating playlists.

I find the artist feature is hit and miss. Usually gets it right, but again, you can change it. But be careful... not all CD's have the name encoded the same. For example, one CD could have the artist as "Earth, Wind, and Fire" and another "Earth, Wind, & Fire" which iTunes sees as two different artists.

Click here to see the page that should help you.

]
iTunes imports all categories as well as basic info about your CD as you rip a CD in iTunes. When you insert your CD, iTunes goes out to the web to download all the data about that CD.
So, when your CD is finished ripping, you've got your music in iTunes along with all the data about tracks, times, titles, composers, performer, genre, etc.
By the way, you can change any of that imported data you want to change by using the "Command-I" key combination. (That's on a Mac; I dunno the key combination to use on a PC.)
An iTunes-loving SFD[/font]

Thanks for all the tips guys. I guess I'll play with it this weekend and see what happens.

One other question. What's the difference between a playlist and a "smart" playlist?