Im Lost, What to do.

I apologize in advance for the long post....

My harddrive in my laptop died. Ive replaced it, Im up and running again, Ive installed Itunes (its changed a lot from the version I was use to using).

Here is where my troubles begin, before I start, I have autorized this computer with the new hard drive. Now I will list mmy questions below.

1. My purchased music is in the cloud. How can i download it to my pc?

2. My entire music collection is on my ipod, many of the songs are ripped cds from my cd collection almost half. How can i get those songs off of my ipod and into itunes? If I sync all those songs will be erased.

3. My wife has an apple id as do I. SOme songs she bought with her account some i bought with mine but i always kept all the songstogether in one itunes music folder.

Is that a problem?

4. My playlists are on my ipod not in itunes since the playlists where lost on my old harddrive. can those playlists be copied from the ipod to itunes?

I cant figure out how to do anything with this new version of itunes. Apple makes is so difficult to do anything, Its almost unmanagebale. I hate it. Im one step closer to leaving itunes for Google Play or Amazon.

Thanks for any help.