I'm trying to clear some space on my 40G hard drive, and my music portion is sucking up 15 gigs of it. My question is this:

When Itunes syncs with my "my music" folder, does it make copies of the music files? If so, is it safe to delete the files from "my music" and Itunes will have its own files to work off of? ANyone know how to compress the video portions of some podcasts so they don't eat up space?

Any tips or suggestions on this is appreciated. Thanks! Jim

Depending on what types of music files you have, the answer is probably "yes". iTunes copies and converts the files from their "native" format (mp3, wav, etc.) to a format compatible with iTunes.

If I understand you, then NO, don't do that!! Each time you try to play a song it will look for the source and will not be able to find it. The songs will stay on your ipod, but will not be available in iTunes. This is my experience at least.

Get a new drive. They're cheap and huge.

On my computer, I store all of my MP3 and WAV files in a Data\MP3 directory. iTunes created an iTunes directory under My Documents\My Music. In that directory, it saved converted versions of all of the music files and gave them "M4A" extensions. After they were imported into iTunes, I moved all of my MP3 files to an external drive, so the system has no way to get to them, but iTunes still works.

That's why I think there should be no problem.

What you could do is rename the directory containing the original music files. If iTunes doesn't have a problem, then you are okay. If it does, then just rename it to whatever the original name was. This way you won't be at risk, and you will know for sure.

(Unless there's something quirky about an ipod that other mp3 players don't do...)

Scrub them files. There are a number of free applications out there to turn iTunes files into "plain vanilla" mp3 files (I use Tunebite). Then move the liberated files into another directory. You'll be able to get out from under the thumb of iTunes - then treat your iPod just like any other player and sync up your tunes without iTunes.

PS - I have a $13.95/month "all you can eat" plan with Napster, and do the same with the wma files it produces (no more "leave Napster and lose your tunes" nonsense).