Guest Author - Lisa Shea

If you've used Napster and have bought an iPod, you're out of luck. Napster does not support the iPod. Here's how to get all your songs - INCLUDING paid in Napster songs - to iTunes.

First, start out by pointing iTunes at your Napster music directory and telling it to import all of the files there. MP3 files will be brought in as is, with no conversion at all. WMA files are not supported by iTunes and will be converted on the fly as they are brought in. That should take care of any music you did NOT buy through the Napster service.

Now you are down to the paid-for songs which are in a special, copy-protected form. You can't just move them and open them. Some people think erroneously that this means that they have to keep using Napster forever to listen to those songs! Au contraire.

In essence you have to export the Napster songs to a "generic common format", and then import from that format into iTunes. If you think about it, the choice is obvious - a music CD! Every music software package under the sun knows how to deal with audio CDs.

So simply get yourself a pile of writeable CDs. They're very cheap. Now write out your Napster paid-for music onto a few CDs, being sure of course to label them properly. It's always good to have a backup of your paid-for music in any case, because as we know hard drives have this tendency to get corrupted or damaged when we least expect it.

Once you have your audio CDs all ready, simply import them into iTunes as you would any CD. You'll probably have to manually label the tracks, but that's really not a big deal. Just put down the artist, song name and original album, and you're all set!