^^The ipod will play plain ol' mp3's from your PC database.However, you need itunes to upload the songs onto the ipod.Once the songs are there, you can't copy them to another PC...well technically you can.Winamp 5+ allows you to acess you ipod where you can check the actual file name on the pod, so then, you can just go into the dir, and copy!LOL.Nothing IT is fool proof.LOL