Alright, so apparently over the week there was a power surge in my house, wiping out the entire computer. This included my iTunes Library, and my ability to sync the iPod without deleting the music already on the iPod. So my question is, how can I make my home computer the "main" library again? NOTE: I've tried authorizing the computer and manually managing the music. It does absolutely nothing.
Unfortunately, iPods don't let you take the music off of it to your hard drive (as that would then mean a ton of pirating). If you bought the stuff off of iTunes, you can redownload for free. However, if you own the music (and even if you don't, but if you don't it's not legal, and therefore I can't recommend it), there are various utilities for doing such. For Mac, a popular one is Senuti. I can't really say for anything else, but search around.
Everything I have on my ipod is either from a CD I own, or purchased from the itunes store. So, hypothetically, I could transfer my purchases to this computer (which I did), transfer all the cd's and then re-sync my ipod?
In iTunes you can look at your account page and look at your purchase history and redownload all your music. I think. Then you just gotta re-rip your CDs and you're grand.
Right. It gave me the option to "transfer purchases" to library. As we speak I am re-ripping all of my CD's. This will take awhile! By the way, thank you Insane.