I recently got an iPod, and am new to the whole thing.  A question for
fellow ipodites:

 

 I have a large library of songs on iTunes at my office computer (a PC).
These are songs I've bought from the iTunes store and also songs from
CDs of mine that I've downloaded to iTunes to make mix CDs and so on.  I
loaded the collection onto my iPod.  Since then I've added and
subtracted songs from the iTunes collection.  If I do a blanket download
of the collection onto my iPod now, how will it react?  Ie, will it
recognize the songs already downloaded and not download them again?
Will it add the new collection to the old collection, resulting in
duplicates of a ton of songs?  Will it just replace the old collection
with the new collection?  Or something else?

 

Also, I have an entirely different collection of songs on iTunes at my
home computer (a Mac).  These songs are all from my CDs and sources
other than iTunes.  Can I download this collection onto my iPod as well,
or is the iPod somehow smart enough to distinguish between different
computers/collections and prevent this?  (I'm only guessing this might
be a possibility, otherwise people could go around downloading all their
friends' iTunes collections onto their iPods and get a lot of iTunes
downloads for free.)

 

Any advice would be appreciated, thanks!

 

iDave