[King of Snake]

Originally Posted by Tiger

ok i admit it i'm a technophobe who likes techno

anyway some advice from some of you technology savvy peeps out there would be greatly appreciated.

i have probably about 400 cds at home, numerous mp3s on an external hard drive mainly essential mixes and the like. thinking of getting an mp3 player (ipod) to put virtually everything on.

see apple do an ipod with 160GB which looks more than enough space, but i'm wondering what alternatives there are. i remember when ipods first came out then had huge issues with mix cds and put a gap between songs which kind of defeats the object of a mix cd.

well iTunes has an option to add a "gapless" album entry to the metadata of your music which should eliminate the gap. In my experience you can still hear the transition between tracks but it's not a gap anymore, just a tiny sort of skip.
Nut sure how iPods deal with it but I'm guessing they should be able to do the same.

also heard some mumblings that itunes doesn't particularly like unlicensed music like mp3 mixes (essential mixes) or friends tracks. also does itunes take up large hard drive space on your computer and make it run slow? thats why i keep all my mixes in an external hard drive.

this seems far fetched. I've never heard of it and have never had any problems playing mp3 mixes or my own or friends' tracks.
iTunes app itself is 159 Mb here (that's on a Mac at work, I use a pc at home and use winamp there instead). I don't think there's any reason it should make your computer run slow, unless maybe you have an older system with very little (less than 1GB) of RAM.

I don't know how iTunes runs on windows these days but I remember it was a bit of a pig initially compared to the mac version.

i know the biggest hassle is going to be actually loading all my cds onto itunes & ipod; and wondered how safely its stored? for example if my computer or ipod gets lost/stolen am i back to square one?

well that's always gonna be something to consider when working with important data. You should definitely choose some sort of backup method and preferably store it someplace else than at your house. Harddrives are insanely cheap these days so you can easily buy an external 500 gig drive and put all your important data on it, then store that at a friends place, or at work and update it once a month or so.
There's also various online backup services that should work ok if you've got a speedy connection and can deal with the long initial upload.