James first started this website when learning Visual Basic back in 1999 whilst studying his GCSEs. The site grew steadily over the years while being run as a hobby - to a regular monthly audience of over half a million unique developers. In July '08 James left his job as Head of Development at a digital agency in London to focus his energies on developerFusion full-time.
Now we've seen the hardware, how do we go about adding our great music collection currently sitting in our CD rack? In October, Apple released a windows version of their own music software; iTunes, so Windows users now have a choice between this and MusicMatch with which to syncronize their music collection. Both work pretty well, but I'll stick to using iTunes here - as its only fair to use Apple's own software.
iTunes for Windows v4.2
When you plug your iPod in, by default iTunes will use its AutoSync mode which copies your entire music library (including playlists) to the iPod and deletes any songs that you've removed from iTunes.iTunes also syncronizes ratings and play counts, so if you've played or rated a song on your iPod, the appropriate fields will be updated in iTunes too. If you want more control (or you've got more music in your collection than will fit on your iPod!) you're still free to manually drag and drop music files and playlists between your iPod and iTunes, plus you can ask it to always sycronize particular playlists.
iTunes also allows you to play music directly off the iPod, in theory allowing you to remove your music collection from your computers hard disk entirely. The iPod also functions as a removable hard disk (the new Dell DJ doesn't!), which means once connected to your computer, it appears as an additional drive, and you can transfer files to and from the iPod. One thing to note is that unlike some other portable music players, you can't simply drag and drop music onto the iPod in Windows Explorer and get the iPod to play it - the music has to be sent to the iPod using either MusicMatch and iTunes. In addition, neither of these will let you sync your music across multiple computers, but other utilities are out there to let you do this.
iTunes is not the best media player out there, and lacks features such as "queue-it-up" and a Now Playing list that Media Player users will be used to (and by now, probably can't live without). However, for a first release to Windows, iTunes does what its designed to do very well, with minimum fuss. Aside from syncing with the iPod, you can copy music CD's into your collection in AAC or MP3 format, and organise your music. You can create "smart" playlists, allowing song lists to be generated on the fly according to certain criteria - using any combination of fields from artist, to bit rate and the number of times you've played the song - and then specify you want to limit the playlist to, say 25 randomly selected songs that meet these conditions.
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