My daughter has a iPod nano. She will connect her iPod to my iTunes and drag and drop songs from my library to her iPod. However, when I try to do the same the song will display a circle with a line through it indicating that this can’t be done. She goes to her girlfriend’s house and obtains music in this manner as well. I have the latest software updates from Apple. Why isn’t this working for my iPod?

- Richard

Your daughter is likely using her iPod in “manual” mode whereas you have your setup to automatically sync content fro. your iTunes library. These two options are mutually exclusive, since if you are choosing to manage the content on your iPod manually, iTunes will never sync any of that music or video content to your iPod automatically—you must add it all manually. On the other hand, if you’re using automatic synchronization, adding content manually doesn’t make sense, as the content should already be synced from your iTunes library automatically. If you’re syncing only selected playlists, you would simply add any tracks that you want on your iPod to the playlists that you’re already syncing to your iPod.

To switch your iPod into manual mode, simply connect your iPod to your computer and select it from the Devies list on the left-hand side of your iTunes window. From the “Summary” screen which appears, look for the option, Manually manage my music and videos

Checking this option and clicking the “Apply” button will switch your iPod into manual mode, and you will then be able to add content to it via drag-and-drop. In manual mode, you can also manage the content directly on the iPod itself through iTunes by clicking on the small triangle to the left of your iPod in the Devices listing and expanding it to show the content on the iPod itself.

From there, you can navigate through it in iTunes as if it were a separate iTunes library, including updating any existing tracks on your iPod or removing tracks from your iPod.

What is the best way for a family to manage multiple iTunes’ libraries? There are three computers in my house, each with a separate iTunes library. Sometimes, one of us would like to add music from another person’s library. We would also like to have all music backed up. The computers are networked wirelessly. What would be the simplest set-up to accomplish all of this? Would it be best to store all music on one drive, or would doing so make the process of syncing considerably slower? And is there any particular software configuration (either on iTunes or other software) that makes this process of sharing and saving easiest?

- Jim

The short answer is to upgrade all of the computers in your household to iTunes 9, which was released this past Wednesday. You can read more information on iTunes 9 in our Instant Expert Article.

iTunes 9 provides a new feature called “Home Sharing” which sounds like exactly what you want. With Home Sharing, you can link all of your iTunes libraries together through your iTunes Store account for the purposes of sharing content between them. Unlike the traditional iTunes library sharing feature, the “Home Sharing” feature allows you to browse the tracks in other users’ libraries on your home network and not only listen to them but also import them into your library. Despite the fact that the feature description repeatedly uses the word “Purchased tracks” this feature works with any content in any of your iTunes libraries, and not just content purchased from the iTunes Store.

If you’re unable to upgrade to iTunes 9 for some reason, then there are other solutions that can be used in iTunes 8 to keep your iTunes libraries in sync and share music between them, but these are definitely more cumbersome and generally require the use of third-party software applications which need to be purchased separately.

As for backing up your music, this ends up being a separate issue. However, if you’re already backing up the computers containing your music, then your music would form part of those backups. If on the other hand you’d prefer to back up your iTunes library in a single, central location, you can still use the iTunes 9 “Home Sharing” feature for this: Simply ensure that one single “master” library contains all of the tracks from the other libraries. The Home Sharing feature allows you to list only those tracks that are in other libraries but not already in your current library, making this option even simpler.

Further, the Home Sharing feature provides the capability for any content added to a remote iTunes library to be automatically synced to the current library. This is accessed from the “Settings” button found at the bottom of the Home Sharing screen.

Do I need to download iTunes if I purchase an iPod or may I use Limewire, etc?

- Anonymous

There actually may be two questions here: The iTunes Store where you can purchase content for your iPod, and the iTunes application for managing the content on your iPod, and

Firstly, the iPod and the iTunes application can import and play any content in the MP3, AAC, AIFF, WAV or Apple Lossless formats, with the only real exception being Windows Media Audio (WMA) files. Unprotected WMA files, however, can be easily converted into an iPod-ready format, and the iTunes software application can actually do this for you automatically during import. The bottom line is that there is absolutely no need to purchase any content from the iTunes Store, and many long-time iPod users have never downloaded even a single track from the iTunes Store.

In terms of the iTunes application, it is important to keep in mind that the iPod uses a database to index the content that is stored on the iPod. As a result, you cannot just drag-and-drop content onto the iPod like you can with many other digital audio players—you will need to use an iPod-compatible application to load and manage the content on your iPod.

The iTunes application is generally the best way to do this, as it’s developed by Apple themselves and therefore guaranteed to be compatible with your iPod. However, there are a number of third-party iPod management applications available which you can also use with your iPod. None of these are endorsed or supported by Apple in any way, and it’s not uncommon for new models of iPod or even firmware updates for existing iPod models to break compatibility with these applications, as Apple is under no obligation to support them.

Note as well that many of these third-party applications do not support all of the features of the iPod. For example, many will let you load music files onto your iPod but not videos, and some do not support things like album artwork either. Further, you will need iTunes for doing things like restoring your iPod in the event of a problem, or applying firmware updates from Apple, so it’s generally a good idea to have it installed on your computer even if you do not intend to actually use it to manage your media content.

iPhone OS 3.1.1 persists in barring the user from being able to use the music library in conjunction with the alarm clock, inexplicably reversing functionality available on iPods for several years. Do you have any recommendations for third party solutions?

- Michael

While we don’t have any specific recommended apps for this, there are a number of third-party apps on the App Store now that will allow you to select an iPod playlist as an alarm clock. This is a capability that became available in the iPhone OS 3.0 release, when it became possible for third-party apps to access the iPod library on your device.

As with any third-party iPhone app, the key limitation in the case of any of these apps is that they cannot run in the background. This means that you would need to leave the app running prior to going to sleep in order for the alarm to actually sound.

An alternative if you regularly use your iPod or iPhone in the same place (ie, your bedroom), is to look at an iPod alarm clock accessory that provides “Wake-to-Playlist” functionality. Most of the current iHome alarm clocks provide this ability, for instance.

With regards to the built-in Clock application still not being able to use a playlist as an alarm, the only thing we can suggest is that our readers who are concerned about this continue to provide product feedback to Apple requesting this feature at http://www.apple.com/feedback.

You guys did a review on the Kensington LiquidAUX about a year ago. I was wondering if you can use the auxiliary input function of the LiquidAUX without plugging the car charger portion into the cigarette lighter?

- Matthew

It is possible to use the LiquidAUX without connecting it to a power source, however you may find that the volume level output is considerably lower than you would expect. It seems that this accessory provides a built-in amplifier which required external power. Whether or not this is a problem will depend largely on your stereo system.

In fact, this creates an additional problem in vehicles that do not apply power to the cigarette lighter port when the engine is not running, as you may see the same results when the car is powered on in a “radio-only” or “accessory” mode. The lack of power to the cigarette lighter port means that the LiquidAUX will not amplify the volume level coming out of it when the car itself is off.

Whenever I use the camera app on my iPhone I get an on-screen message telling me that “Camera would like to use your current location. Photos will be tagged with the location where they were taken.” Apart from wasting time when I want to take a quick shot, it is also very irritating. I have never wanted to use this function - I simply don’t see the point of it - and would like to know if there is a way of disabling it. Obviously I can always press “Don’t Allow”, but I’d like to disable the function entirely so that I don’t see the message every time I use the camera.

- Dave

Actually, the message should only prompt you for permission twice—after you choose “Don’t Allow” twice it should no longer bother you unless you go into your iPhone Settings and choose the “Reset Location Warnings” option found under General, Reset.

You can actually try resetting the location warnings to see if that makes the message go away. It should still prompt you twice, but should then stop prompting you after that. If this fails, you can disable location-based services entirely by going into your iPhone Settings app, choosing the General option and then toggling “Location Services” to OFF.

Note, however, that this will disable all location services on your iPhone, including finding your current location in the Maps application or any other third-party applications that may rely on location-based services.

If for some reason the Camera app still persists in prompting you each time you open it, the other option would be to simply choose to allow the Camera app to geo-tag your photos and strip out the location data yourself later if you really don’t want it in your photos. Note that many third-party apps on your iPhone itself will also provide you with the option of removing this information before uploading to services such as Flickr, and third-party photo services such as Facebook that don’t support geotagging won’t use this information anyway and it is therefore not included when these photos are uploaded.