I currently have an ipod mini 4 gig and ripping my music to lossless. Everytime I rip a cd i rip it with apple lossless, needless to say I am running out of space and I know there is a way to transfer music to ipod that i only want to have at the moment, is there a way to transfer only checked files while still having the files that i don't use at the moment in my itunes? Basically I am starting to have a lot of lossless files in my itunes which would not fit on my 4 gig. I would like to be able to change my song list in my mini without having to clear it from itunes. Where do I go to set to copy only checked files? This way I can keep on ripping to lossless and just choose which music to add to my mini every week or so. Thanks for all the advises.

If you look in iPod tab in the preferences, there's an option to only sync checked songs.

... or selected playlists or manual (which I do).

Ay, as blessingx says. Make a playlist & name it "my iPod" or whatever, shove in what you want on the iPod, go to iPod prefs & choose "sync selected playlists only" picking out said list. Much more practical than keeping track of and organizing selcted tracks. Maybe you also want to give smart playlists a go. For example, if space on your computer is no issue, you could well encode to ALAC, have iTunes create copys of those files transcoded to AAC, and get a smart playlist to collect all songs at the given bitrate.

And now somebody please tell me why I do not get head-fi notifications anymore, it's ticking me off