UNLIKE ITS DESCENDANT, THE iPod Touch, the iPod Classic needs to connect to your computer—and iTunes—as part of the setup process. So if you haven’t installed iTunes on your Windows PC or Mac, flip back to Install iTunes for instructions.

Once you have iTunes up and running, take a look inside the box your Classic came in. It should include these items:

What you want right now is the USB cable. Connect the small, narrow end to your computer’s USB port and the wide, flat end to the iPod Classic. (Thanks to the USB connection, the iPod’s battery begins to charge when you plug it into the computer.) If it’s not open already, iTunes leaps into action, popping up on your screen, ready to walk you through the Classic configuration process.

Use iTunes to Configure Your Classic

The iTunes Setup Assistant now takes over. It walks you through a few screens that format your new Classic for use with a Windows PC or a Mac, and then it loads music and other content onto your ’Pod.

If this isn’t your first iPod—maybe you had a Nano or a Shuffle and decided you needed a lot more room for your music collection and only a 160-gigabyte Classic would fit—you might already have music tracks and other files in your iTunes library. If that’s the case, iTunes can copy all those audio tracks over to your new Classic and you’re good to go.

But if this is your first visit to Apple Land and you’ve never used iTunes to load up an iProduct, you can have iTunes automatically copy over your media to your iPod; see Load Music onto the iPod Classic for details. Alternatively, you can pick and choose (or “manually manage”) what goes onto your iPod; see how on Manual management.

In addition to formatting the Classic, the Setup Assistant offers to register your new iPod with Apple. These screens take a few minutes to click through, but can pay off later, as your iPod’s serial number is linked to your name in Apple’s database—and that can speed up technical support at the Genius Bar or an Apple-autorized provider since there’s a record of your purchase.

When you finish setting up and registering your new Classic, its icon appears at the top of the iTunes window, under “iPod.” Click the iPod’s icon to see details on your new media player—and, as you will soon see, to copy files to it.

Note

Windows PCs can’t read the Mac disk format, but a Mac can read a Windows-formatted iPod Classic. If you want to use your iPod with both systems—say a Windows PC at work and a Mac at home—plug your ’Pod into the Windows PC first and let iTunes format it for Windows.

ALTHOUGH THE BIG WHEEL on the front of the Classic gets all the attention, the top and bottom edges of the player handle all your connections for power and sound. Here’s what each port and switch does:

On the top edge of the iPod Classic, you have:

JUST AS WITH THE original Classic, you still drive today’s model with that great big ring of controls on the front of the player. Commonly called the click wheel, this where you control your Classic’s playback functions for music, video, games, and photo slideshows. To turn on the Classic, push any button on the wheel. From there, you control the player like so:

If you get no response when you push a click-wheel button, check to make sure the Classic’s Hold switch (previous page) isn’t on and that the iPod’s battery hasn’t run down. (Charge Your iPod has more on charging up the battery.)

LIKE ANY MODERN GADGET, the iPod uses a series of menus and submenus to control it. You can recognize the Classic’s top-level, or main, menu because it says “iPod” at the top of the screen. No matter how deeply you burrow into the player’s submenus, you can always get back to the main menu by repeatedly pressing the Menu button on the click wheel.

Think of Classic navigation like this: Press the center button to go deeper into menus and press the Menu button to back out, retracing your steps along the way. The contents of your iPod menu vary a bit depending on what you’re doing at the time and whether you changed any of the default settings, but here’s the basic lineup. The next page shows you how to mix and match menu items:

Customize Your iPod’s Menus

The iPod Classic lets you customize both your main menu and your music menu so you see only the options you like. For example, you could add “Calendar” as a main menu item so you don’t have to dig through the Extras menu to get at it.

To do that, choose iPod→Settings→Main Menu. As you scroll down the list of menu items, press the center button to add (or delete) each one from the main menu. You might, for example, consider adding these commands:

• Clock, for quick checks of the time.

• Games, for quick killing of time.

• Contacts, to look up phone numbers and call people to pass the time.

To see the fruits of your labor, press Menu twice to return to the main screen. Sure enough, in addition to the usual items, you see the formerly buried menus right out front, ready to go.

Now that you’ve got your Classic’s main menu squared away, you can customize your iPod’s music screen by choosing Settings→Music Menu.

Want to learn more iPod settings? Turn the page.

THE SETTINGS MENU HAS more than a dozen options for tailoring your iPod’s look and sound.

NOT EVERYONE WANTS TO haul around their entire iTunes library—and some people can’t even if they wanted to because they have too much stuff. Here are the various ways to load music onto the Classic from iTunes.

Selective sync

If you want more control over what goes on your iPod, click the iPod icon at the top of the iTunes window. Along the top of the next screen, you see a row of tabs marked Music, Movies, TV Shows, and so on. Now:

1. Click the Music tab and turn on the checkbox next to Sync Music.

2. Click the button next to “Selected playlists, artists, albums, and genres” and in the list that appears below, turn on the checkboxes next to everything you want to copy to the iPod. Turn on the checkbox next to “Automatically fill free space with songs” if you want to top off the iPod’s tank with extra music after iTunes copies over your selections.

3. Click Apply and then Sync to make it so.

Selectively syncing your iPod lets you automatically copy certain items (the ones you choose in step 2 above) each time you connect your player. But you can still manually drag new items from your iTunes library onto the iPod when you want (see next page).

Manual management

If you don’t have enough room on your Classic for your whole iTunes library, or if you plan to load music onto your iPod from more than one computer—say your work PC and home PC—you’ll want to manually manage your songs and other media. (If you’ve already chosen autosync, click the iPod’s Summary screen when it’s connected to iTunes and turn on the checkbox next to “Manually manage music and videos.”) iTunes now refrains from automatically dumping everything onto your iPod. “But,” you ask, “how do I get the music on there by myself?” Easy—you just drag it:

1. In iTunes, click the Music icon under the Library pop-up menu. Click the Songs button to see all the songs in your music library. You can also click Ctrl+B (⌘-B) to go into Column Browser view (Change the Look of the iTunes Window), where iTunes lists your music by genre, artist, and album.

2. Click the songs or albums you want to copy to your iPod. Grab multiple songs or albums by holding down the Ctrl (⌘) key while clicking.

3. Drag your selections to the right side of the screen, onto the iPod icon that appears. The number of songs you’re dragging appears inside a red circle.

You can manually load any items in your iTunes library—audiobooks, movies, whatever—onto your iPod this way.

SOMETIMES, YOU JUST HAVE to hear the good part of a song again or watch that scene in a movie once more because it was so cool the first time. If that’s the case, the iPod gives you the controls to make it happen.

This jump-to-the-best-part technique is called scrubbing, so if a fellow iPodder tells you to scrub over to 2:05 in a song to hear a great guitar solo, he’s not talking about cleaning the bathtub. It’s all about having a fast-forward/reverse control with a visual guide.

Here’s how to scrub on the iPod Classic:

AS YOUR MUSIC COLLECTION grows, scrolling to find a song or album can leave you thumb-weary. Sometimes, you may not even remember if you have a certain song on the Classic, given its 160 gigabytes of storage. The Classic’s Search feature lets you drill down through your massive library to locate specific songs, albums, and so on with a few spins of the click wheel. It works like this:

SEARCHING BY SONG NAME is one way to find the music you’re looking for, but you can visually search your Classic’s music collection, too. Press iPod→Music→Cover Flow to see all your music displayed as miniature album covers (or gray music notes if you haven’t added art; see Fetch Missing Album Covers).

To take a stroll through the music, slide your thumb along the iPod’s scroll wheel to see the covers sail by. When you see an album you want to play, press . To see the tracks on the album, press the center button to flip the cover around. Scroll to the desired song and press to play it.

PUTTING A COPY OF your contacts file—also known as your computer’s address book—on your iPod is easy with the help of iTunes.

Windows users need to store their contacts in Outlook Express, Outlook 2003 or later, Windows Contacts, or the Windows Address Book (used by Outlook Express and some other email programs).

Mac folks need to have at least Mac OS X 10.5 (Leopard) and the Mac OS X Address Book (shown below), which Apple’s Mail program uses to stash names and numbers. You can also use Entourage 2004 or later and Outlook 2011, but you have to link before you sync: In the mail program, choose Preferences, and then click Sync Services. Turn on the checkboxes for sharing contacts and calendars with Address Book and iCal (Apple’s calendar program) to have the shared info synced up with Address Book and iCal.

To turn your iPod Classic into a little black book, follow these steps:

iTunes updates your iPod with the contact information stored in your address book. To ditch a person, delete him or her from your computer’s address book, and the contact disappears from your iPod the next time you sync up.

To look up a pal on an iPod Classic, choose iPod→Extras→Contacts and scroll to the name of the person. Press the center button, and you’ll see his address card pop up on-screen.

JUST AS ITUNES CAN pluck contacts out of your computer’s address book, so it can snag and sync a copy of your desktop’s daily or monthly schedule to your iPod Classic—if you use Outlook on your PC or iCal on your Mac. (You can also use Entourage 2004 or later by choosing, in Entourage, Preferences→Sync Services and turning on the option to have Entourage share events with iCal; Outlook 2011 for the Mac works the same way.)

To get your calendar connected, fire up iTunes and follow these steps:

To look up your busy schedule on a Classic, choose iPod→Extras→Calendars. Select the name of the calendar you want to examine and press the center button. You get a blue-and-gray grid with tiny red flags planted on the days you have something scheduled. Use the scroll wheel to navigate to a particular day, and then press the center button to see the details.

If you use the To Do list function in your calendar program, your action items appear in their own place on the Classic. Choose iPod→Extras→Calendars→To Do’s. You can also have your iPod remind you of upcoming events. To turn on Nag Alerts on the Classic, choose iPod→Extras→Calendars→Alarms. You have your choice of Off, Beep, or None (the last displays a silent message on-screen).

WHEN YOU CONNECT YOUR iPod to your computer, the player’s clock syncs up with the one on your Windows PC or Mac. If you don’t sync that often or you travel between time zones, you may need to reset the clock.

To adjust your current clock for things like daylight saving time, the current date, the time zone—or to opt for the military-style 24-hour clock display—choose iPod→Settings→Date & Time.

To change the city a clock represents, click it with the Classic’s center button and then select Edit. Pick the geographic area you want from the Region menu, and then choose a city on the next screen. The clock adjusts itself to the new time zone.

You aren’t stuck with just one clock on the Classic. Your iPod can also serve as a world timekeeper, showing the hour in places faraway. Here’s how to add multiple clocks:

If you want to change a clock, select it and press the iPod’s center button to bring up the Edit and Delete options. Choose Edit, which takes you back through the whole “pick a region, pick a city” exercise.

If you decide you have too many clocks and don’t need that Bora Bora timepiece after all, select the unwanted clock from the list. Press the center button on the iPod, scroll down to Delete, and then press the center button again to erase time.

IT MAY NOT HAVE the booming wake-up powers of a bedside alarm clock, but the iPod Classic’s alarm can give you a gentle nudge when you need it.

To set your alarm:

If you wake up early and want to turn off the alarm so it doesn’t bother anybody else, go to Extras→Alarms→[Name of Alarm]→Alarm and press the center button to toggle it off. You can also delete an alarm with the Delete option at the bottom of the menu.

THE IPOD CLASSIC DOESN’T just play sound, it can record it, too, thanks to its Voice Memos feature. You do need to invest in an external microphone for the player first, though—Apple’s optional Earphones with Remote and Mic (available for $29 at www.apple.com/ipodstore) or a compatible third-party microphone. In fact, you need a microphone connected to even see the Voice Memos menus on the Classic.

Once you have your microphone in place, you can start your recording session:

To erase a recording from the Classic, press the center button to select it, and then choose Delete from the menu. The next time you sync your iPod, iTunes copies your recordings to its Voice Memos playlist. You can find audio files on Classics enabled for disk use (described below) in the iPod’s Recordings folder.

AS IF BEING A portable entertainment system and organizer isn’t enough, your iPod Classic can also serve as a portable hard drive to shuttle documents, presentations, and other files from one computer to another.

To give your iPod these file-toting powers:

Your iPod now shows up as an icon in the My Computer area of Windows or on the Mac desktop. You can drag files on and off the icon just as you would files for any other drive connected to your computer. You can also double-click the iPod icon to create folders for your files.

IT’S A LITTLE-KNOWN FEATURE, but the iPod Classic and older click-wheel Nanos can display basic text files on-screen. You create these iPod notes as plain text files (those with a .txt extension), like those from Windows Notepad or TextEdit on a Mac. (You can’t read full-fledged word-processing documents from Microsoft Word or Apple’s Pages unless you save them as plain text files.)

To use the iPod’s Notes feature:

As you read, you can use the scroll wheel to page up and down through the file. Press the Menu button to close the file and return to the list of notes.

Using the iPod as a text reader is a handy way to bring your grocery list with you so you can rock while you shop. But to browse prose more challenging than “Buy Pampers,” swing by Project Gutenberg’s website at www.gutenberg.us. Here you can download thousands of public-domain literary works as plain text files and transfer them to your iPod’s Notes folder. (The iPod can display files up to only a measly 4 kilobytes in size; to read longer files, see the list of shareware programs on this book’s Missing CD page at www.missingmanuals.com/cds/ipodtmm11/.)

THE IPOD CLASSIC IS a personal entertainment machine on many levels, and it comes with three games: Klondike, iQuiz, and Vortex. To find them, go to iPod→Extras→Games.

iQuiz

Complete with colorful flashing graphics and a cheesy, ‘70s-style game show soundtrack, iQuiz picks your brain with contemporary multiple-choice questions in several trivia categories like music, movies, and TV. The game brings its own questions to the screen, but it also taps into your iPod to find out how much you know about your own library.

Vortex

Most computers and handheld devices wouldn’t be complete without some brick-bashing version of the old Pong-against-the-wall game. Vortex scales up the basic concept to 360 degrees of brick-smashing 3-D fun. Use the scroll wheel to move the bat around the edges of the circular Vortex and audibly smash through the rotating bricks.