Can I do this? (ipod/itunes)

[seashells]

I'm sorta anti-technology so I've been living under a rock. My dad just got my mom an ipod. I set it up for her, including creating a new itunes account for her. Now I'm home (we live 1500 miles away) and was thinking I would love to be able to load some songs on her ipod by taking cds that I have and copying them to the itunes account.

I have an itunes account, though I only used it for one purpose (to buy a few songs for DD and burn a CD for her). So I load up itunes, sign out of my account, and sign into my mom's account. But I still see the same songs in my library, and I don't see the 2 albums my mom bought on her ipod. Even though I'm logged into her account.

So does that mean that my songs are only stored on my hard drive, and I can't load them into her account and thus her ipod?

I tried googling about this question, but the question seems difficult to put into a basic keyword phrase.

[Auntie Sapphire]

I think the phrase you need to search for might be "how to share itunes libraries". But that's just a guess. Good luck!

[ecoteat]

Right--the music is stored on your computer. Your iTunes account keeps track of what your purchased from the iTunes store, but once you buy it it is on your computer. You can authorize more than one computer to have access to the same account, but you need to manually move songs between computers once they are added to your computer's library. I've never done that, but I agree that if you Google "share iTunes library" you'll find lots of info. If you find something that refers to sharing on your local network, that won't help you. You need to figure out how to share remotely via the Internet.

Or you could go relatively low-tech and burn CDs for her, mail them to her, and let her load them onto her computer's iTunes library. Or just loan her the CDs you already have. If this is something you plan on doing only occasionally, I think it would be much easier that way than spending the time dealing with what sounds like would be a pretty steep learning curve for both of you. There don't appear to be any simple solutions--the things I've come across in my limited experience with this tend to involve some extra software. This is not a feature that iTunes has built in (that I know of).

[lillian]

you could import your cds into your computer and push the mp3s up to a free box.net account.  send your mother the link and she can download the mps3 and import them into her itunes library.

[seashells]

Thank you for the input. I did realize later that there was no way that iTunes/iPod would make it THAT easy. lillian, I like your idea and could do that on my end no problem, but I don't think my mother would be able to do her part. I might set that up anyway on my end, and next time we visit I can just finish the transfer and set her up.

[lillian]

if you both download mikogo (mikogo.com) you can take control of your mother's computer from yours and you can import the songs for her.