Where to Buy Music for Your Apple iPod

Now that you have an iPod, where are you going to go to get music for it? After all, the device doesn’t do you much good without music, does it? When you are trying to get music on your iPod, you have several options to consider.

The most obvious place to go for iPod downloads is the iTunes Store. The iTunes Store is an online store where you can purchase digital songs that are ready to download to your iPod. Songs purchased from the iTunes Store cost $0.99 each. International prices are fairly comparative to the U.S. prices. You can also purchase entire albums on the site, and these are priced at $9.99.

If you have an iPod with video capacity, you can purchase TV shows and movies as well. Most TV shows cost $2.00 an episode, and full length films cost $9.99, unless they are new releases, which sell for $14.99. Games are also for sale, and they range in price from $0.99 to $4.99.

Most songs you purchase from the iTunes Store will be in Advanced Audio Coding format. They are usually encrypted with FairPlay, Apple’s digital rights management program, which restricts how they can be used. iTunes Songs are 128 kbit/s and can stream into MP4. This gives them a higher quality of sound than traditional MP3 files that have the same speed. Some songs are available without the FairPlay encoding at a faster 256 kbit/s speed.

The restrictions imposed by FairPlay allow users to make no more than seven CDs of any one playlist that contains songs they have purchased from the iTunes Store. The songs can only be uploaded to five computers. In order to upload the songs to a computer, the user must have an iPod or the iTunes application. Individual songs can be burned to CD an unlimited number of times.

The other way to get music for your iPod is to use your own CDs. The iTunes application allows you to change any song from a CD into the proper file format to be used with your iPod. To do this, simply open the application and put the CD into your computer’s CD drive. The title will appear in the iTunes menu screen. You can then bring up a list of the tracks on the CD. Uncheck any songs you do not want to add to iTunes. You will then click “Import CD” and the songs will be added to iTunes. When you connect your iPod to the computer, they will also be uploaded to your iPod.