If you’re one of the millions of music lovers who got any one of the three iPod models for Christmas, congratulations! If you’re one of the perhaps thousands of new Zune owners who have been trying to install the quirky software, figure out how to buy music from the Zune Marketplace, and have spent many a lonely hour hoping to find another Zune to wirelessly “squirt” (not my term – Microsoft’s CEO Steve Ballmer came up with that one) music to, well, “Welcome to the Social”.

Thankfully, you may still have time, depending on the return policy of the store where the blue-or-red-shirted Orc talked you into buying a Zune, to rid yourself of the “Social” disease and get something else. Good luck.

Anyway, if you got your first iPod this Christmas, here’s some tips for building a strong and fruitful relationship with your new best buddy.

If you’re like most new iPod owners, you couldn’t wait to connect your iPod to your computer to get some music onto it. If you’re a Windows user, you most likely installed iTunes from the CD that came with the iPod. You’ll remember that after installation iTunes searched your computer for songs encoded in Windows Media Audio (WMA) format, and asked if you wanted to convert them to play on your iPod.

If you said “Yes”, iTunes converted your WMA-formatted files to Apple’s AAC (Advanced Audio Codec, a cousin of the MP3) format, which is iTune’s and the iTunes Store’s “native” format.

The next thing you probably did (regardless of your computer platform of choice) was to import songs from a commercial music CD. This is known in the iPod lexicon as “ripping” a CD. When you rip music from a CD into iTunes, you are converting the CD’s uncompressed, high-quality, big-file-size AIFF (the standard format for commercial music CDs) files into smaller, compressed, AAC files. iTune’s default setting for the resulting files is pretty high quality and will sound great on your iPod.

You can, however, choose higher quality conversion options from the Preferences pane at iTunes > Preferences > Advanced > Importing. iTunes can import and your iPod can play the AIFF format found on the CD, but each three minute song will be around 30 megabytes (MB) in size. 128 kbps bitrate AAC files of the same song are under 2 MB in size. As with all digital media, there’s always a trade-off between fidelity and file size. If you’re a real audiophile, or you want to plan ahead for a time when you’re playing your iPod through a “real stereo” and not just earbuds, you might consider a higher quality bitrate. We could spend an entire article talking about bitrates, but for now, let’s move on.

iTunes organizes your music based upon information, called an ID3 tag, which is embedded in the music files themselves, similar to metadata attached to digital images. In the case of music ripped from CDs, however, the CD doesn’t supply the ID3 tag information. iTunes will, if you’re connected to the internet, go to an online database and fill in the ID3 tags for you. This is the Name, Time, Artist, Album, and Genre (among other) information presented in the song list in the iTunes main window. If you can’t connect to the internet, you’re pretty much stuck with entering the information by hand.

As we are running out of space for this week, let me offer one last valuable resource should you find yourself with questions about the care, feeding, and filling of your new iPod. Track down a teenager - specifically those with white earbud cords dangling from their pierced earlobes.

© 2007 Peter F. Zimowski