I had starting ripping my CD’s to disk back in the 90’s. Have close to 3K songs. Any new CD gets ripped first thing when I get home. When I first got my iPhone and had to install iTunes, I told iTunes where my music library was and that was that. When it synced my iPhone it transferred the whole library to the device. iTunes purchases through the iPhone, get synced back to the library. Oh and they are, or should be DRM free as Jobs forced the issue with the record labels.
The cool thing about iTunes on the iphones was: when you’re watching a movie or tv show and you like a particular song or artist, you can whip out the iPhone and look it up in iTunes. If you really like the song and they have it, you can downloaded right then and there.
Piker. As of this moment, I have 22,866 songs, 59.7 Days of music on my desktop. I have an Airport Express connected to my home entertainment system and can use my iPhone as a remote to play anything in that library through it.