The Missing Manual: iPod and iTunes Second Edition PDF Manual
Sleek and smart as the iPod may be, it can’t do much by itself until it meets up with a computer. Once connected to a Mac or PC, however, the iPod is ready to accept whatever you want to give it—your whole music library, of course, but also everything from the complete recorded works of Tom Petty to your phone book, from news and calendar information to files too big to fit on a burned CD. This chapter is dedicated to that concept of iPod as Satellite to Your Computer. It explains FireWire and USB 2.0, and how to use these connections to get songs and files off the mother ship and onto the ultraportable, ready-to-go iPod.
FireWire Apart from boosting magazine sales, there’s never been much value in sitting in front of the computer, waiting for large files to copy onto external drives and other add-ons. In the eternal search for faster data-transfer speeds, Apple developed a new high-speed cable called FireWire in the mid-1990s. It’s easy to use, it’s hot-swappable (you don’t have to turn off anything before plugging or unplugging the cable), and—
unlike SCSI cables, which came before it—it doesn’t force you to go through configuration acrobatics to get multiple devices to all work properly.
Dozens of other companies, including Windows PC makers, eventually picked up FireWire. Some gave it other names along the way: IEEE 1394 (its official moniker from the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, an industry standards group) and i.LINK, used primarily by Sony. But whatever the name, it’s still the same speedy connection underneath.
The iPod Sync Connection 36 ipod & itunes: the missing manual With its ability to move 400 megabits of data per second, FireWire was quickly
adopted by a product that needs to get an enormous amount of information from Point A to Point B: the digital camcorder. Other hardware with a need for speed, like external CD burners and hard drives, followed the path to FireWire connectivity. FireWire’s speed makes possible one of the iPod’s best tricks: slurping in an entire CD’s worth of music from your computer in ten seconds. It’s also how the iPod gets its battery charge. That’s great if you have a Macintosh, because every Macintosh made since about 1998 has a FireWire connector built right in (see Figure 2-1).
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January 24, 2009 | Posted in iPod
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