Ipod And Itunes - Friends Or Foes?
By John Roberts
Despite how user friendly iTunes is, it can nonetheless prove a real threat to the music collection stored on your iPod. Before saying anything else, rest assured that there are steps you can take to essentially eliminate this risk, but if you keep the default iTunes settings, the risk will remain.

The first impression iTunes gives is that of a very simple and easy to use software to buy music online. It also servers as a library with a huge amount of music data as well as the primary application through which you manage you iPod. Before that slick interface, however, lies cutting-edge encryption, authentication and digital rights management technology (DRM) that tries to make sure that what you download and play on your is actually paid for!

Apart from Apple's own DRM restrictions, iTunes seems to do everything in it's power to make sure you loose your music collection. Here is a list of dangerous iTunes behaviors and settings.

Automation

Even if you are a complete beginner using PCs or an iPod, you should never, ever allow for automatic synchronization between your iTunes' music library and the library stored on your iPod. You see, an can only be tied to a single iTunes library, at least in terms of synchronization. Hence, if you connect your to a friend's computer (or vice versa) and iTunes starts synchronizing the two libraries, all content on the will be lost! To avoid that, go to Edit - Preferences - and select Manual

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