Yeah these guys are right, you are crazy not to get an external drive, unless you consider your labor worth less than 50 cents an hour. Your music is not backed up on the ipod and you can't get it back out without buying a program like ipod liberator. If you rip your music to a hard drive in lossless it will be safe and can be copied once you start to see how nice it is to have all your music available at the touch of a button.
How to stop iPod Syncing?
I'm thinking of buying an iPod classic (the new 120 GB version) to start loading up with most of my CD's, using Apple Lossless compression.
Trouble is, my laptop only has a 30GB HDD, so as I rip CD's to iTunes and then transfer to the iPod, I will need to delete them from my laptop or rapidly run out of disc space. (I will backup my rips to an external HDD for safety!)
Of course, when I connect the iPod to the laptop later to add/change anything, it will try to sync and find none of the tracks on the computer, and I assume will try to delete them from the iPod; can I tell the ipod NOT to sync when I connect it, but just let me transfer or delete things like the old fashioned "Drag and drop" technique?
Trouble is, my laptop only has a 30GB HDD, so as I rip CD's to iTunes and then transfer to the iPod, I will need to delete them from my laptop or rapidly run out of disc space. (I will backup my rips to an external HDD for safety!)
Of course, when I connect the iPod to the laptop later to add/change anything, it will try to sync and find none of the tracks on the computer, and I assume will try to delete them from the iPod; can I tell the ipod NOT to sync when I connect it, but just let me transfer or delete things like the old fashioned "Drag and drop" technique?