iPod Help

[Larry]

I just got an iPod yesterday. My computer is still broken, and my dad's laptop doesn't have a USB 2.0 port. So I went to my brother's house, plugged in my Storage drive from my broken PC, and put in the iPod. I installed the included software, then put in the iPod when it instructed me to.

It accidently takes all of my brother's wife's music, so I take her shit off of the iTunes list and put on my music. I have about 4GB of music, and the iPod is a 40GB model. It says it has to change all the WMAs into AACs because WMAs aren't secure or something. So it does that, and runs across a song that is a secured WMA and it says it can't convert it. I click "OK," and it drops all of the work it was doing.

When I go through the Advanced menu in iTunes, and click the iPod tab, it says "No iPod is connected." What the fuck? Why does it say that? I checked the connection and made sure the iPod was in. She has USB 2.0 ports, and it's clearly inserted. I have the iPod on the docking bay, with the USB 2.0 cord plugged from the computer into the docking bay. Do I have to just have the iPod plugged straight into the wire, avoiding the docking bay?

It won't transfer the music, and iTunes really fucking sucks. Anyone know how to help me? It's a $400 Christmas present, so I don't want it to just waste away, and I don't want to have to get a MP3 Player that's not as good as the iPod. Any help would be extremely appreciated. I'd owe my life to the person who can help.

[DarthEvilDude]

i reccomend using Firewire instead of USB. my folk's iPod transfers better with the firewire connection.

so until you get a computer up and running with it, your S.O.L.

and instead of doing that whole wma converting thing, burn the wma's to a cd, then import the cd on itunes.

[Larry]

Well, I have an update for anyone who cares.

When it came across the secured WMA that it couldn't convert, it didn't drop its whole load; it converted all the songs and then told me at the end that one wasn't able to be changed.

The docking bay, for some reason, doesn't work too well. I plugged the USB 2.0 straight into the iPod, and it connected and asked me what I wanted to name the iPod. Then I could finally see the iPod inside of iTunes. So the docking bay must be only for holding it and charging the battery.

When I started transferring my Library, another problem reared its ugly head. iTunes would say that the songs were going through and being processed, but eventually it would say that some of the songs couldn't be added. After importing 1/26th of my music (the "A" artists), only the first 10 of them were added. I got all pissed and was seriously considering destroying the iPod. The problem? The iPod wasn't fully charged, and in the included User's Manual, it says that if the thing isn't 100% charged some of the songs may drop during transfer.

So, after all is said and done, and another iPod-less day passes, I finally have it all figured out. Charge it fully, plug the iPod directly into the PC bypassing the docking bay, and go to town. I've had the thing since Christmas Eve in the AM, and I should have my whole music drive on it by tomorrow afternoon.

[Larry]

Okay, I have another update for anyone with an iPod that cares about my troubles.

I've been trying since Christmas Eve in the afternoon to get the iPod to work. All the days leading up to yesterday I built the foundation for there to be no errors whatsoever on the part of the iPod. Everything was rock solid and unbreakable. I deleted my Music Library and reimported all of the songs. After it converted the WMAs into AACs, I right-clicked on "Larry's iPod" and clicked "Update songs on Larry's iPod" in the Source menu and all the songs started going onto the iPod. YES!

It completes all of the artists beginning with the letter "A." Unfortunately for me, it gets to the middle of the "B" list and gives me a "disk error." I safely removed the hardware from my PC, and looked in the iPod itself to see if any of the songs had transfered. NO SONGS WERE ON THE iPOD! I had enough, and took the iPod back to the Apple store today. The guy who helped us (part of the "Genius Team" or whatever) couldn't even figure out what was wrong, so we exchanged it for a new one. He suspects it was a problem with the iPod itself which was beyond my control. Now I have a new one, and tomorrow I'll put the songs onto it. Hopefully the transfer goes smooth.

[Dualist]

Whoa, someone at Apple doesn't know what happened to the old one? That's scary.

Well hopefully everything works out, and when all of your brother wife's music was automatically downloaded on to your ipod, sucks as welll on the iTunes.

[Duality]

Try ephpod (http://www.ephpod.com/). Its a freeware tool that lets you bypass everything involving iTunes, which frankly bites the nut in terms of functionality, unless you like how it controls every aspect of your filing convention.

Everyone I know with an iPod swears on ephpod, however.

Also, if you have WMA, I'd suggest going ahead and using something like dbpoweramp (http://www.dbpoweramp.com/) to try and convert them to MP3. You'll probably have a lot more success than whatever iTunes tries to do.

[Larry]

Thanks for the links Jon. I think iTunes converts songs well, and generally I think it's ok, but it's definitely not great. It gets the job done, and from all of these days interacting with it, I have a good handle on how to work it. When you first connect your iPod, you can hold down Ctrl+Shift and start iTunes, which keeps it from auto-syncing. When it auto-syncs, it makes your iPod resemble your Library on iTunes. That means if your iPod is full, but your iTunes Library is empty, it'll delete every song from your iPod. Needless to say that is really annoying.

[Duality]

That's insane.

Synchronization goes both ways. Apparently, nobody at Apple used a PDA.

[Larry]

That's insane.

Synchronization goes both ways. Apparently, nobody at Apple used a PDA.
It's insane and sucks hard. I guess they did it that way to make the shit super easy, but if I hadn't read about the Ctrl+Shift trick at iPodLounge.com (which isn't mentioned in the iPod manual, or Apple's site, or anywhere) I'd be pretty fucked.

[AcquiredTarget]

Synchronization goes both ways. Apparently, nobody at Apple used a PDA.*cough* Newton *cough* (Yeah, I know I proved yer point http://allgames.com/images/smilie/042.gif). Actually, I've had to support Palm PDAs on Macs and that was a pain in the ass as there seemed to be more issues on Macs than on Windows.

[Dualist]

When it auto-syncs, it makes your iPod resemble your Library on iTunes. That means if your iPod is full, but your iTunes Library is empty, it'll delete every song from your iPod. Needless to say that is really annoying.

Agreed, but I do have one question Larry:

You know when you say...empty your playlist? Does it really delete the songs, I'm just curious so its not still stored on the hardrive invisibly. I would love to manually delete the song just to make sure.

(I hope you guys know on the PC when you delete a file...it doesn't quite delete itself from its harddrive...just wondering if its the saem case here)

[Larry]

Agreed, but I do have one question Larry:

You know when you say...empty your playlist? Does it really delete the songs, I'm just curious so its not still stored on the hardrive invisibly. I would love to manually delete the song just to make sure.

(I hope you guys know on the PC when you delete a file...it doesn't quite delete itself from its harddrive...just wondering if its the saem case here)
By "empty the playlist" I mean that you go to Edit - Select All, then hit the Delete key. All that does is remove the songs from the iTunes Library, it doesn't delete the actual music from your harddrive.

[Duality]

(I hope you guys know on the PC when you delete a file...it doesn't quite delete itself from its harddrive...just wondering if its the saem case here)
This is true for mostly any hard drive. From MP3 drives to Mac to PC hard drives. You're right that when a file is deleted, all of that information is flagged to be overwritten, which is why you can run a file recovery tool to get that information back. However, its not exclusive to the PC because the mechanical effort it takes to clear the bits from the drive when a file is deleted leads to unnecessary wear and tear.

[Dualist]

So lemme get this straight. If I download a song onto iPod...and later on I do not want it...and I use iTunes method of deleting it, it still stays on the harddrive?

So does it still take up memory for something that should of been "deleted"?

[Larry]

Well, this guy that my brother works with told him to format the iPod through Windows in the Computer Management area. So I did that, and it fucked the iPod bad. I tried to do what the manual says to reset the iPod (toggle the Hold switch on and off, then press Play/Pause and Menu at the same time), and that didn't do anything. The manual also said to plug the iPod into your PC and use the iPod Updater to restore it to factory default. I tried that, and the iPod Updater wouldn't acknowledge the fact that the iPod was plugged in, even though Windows does.

So, I took the iPod back to the Apple Store. Second iPod down. However, the person at the "Genius Bar" figured out how to get the iPod operational again, so tomorrow I venture to my brother's again to finally wrap up this fucking fiasco. If I have any troubles whatsoever that I cannot resolve, I'm going to move onto another MP3 player. Hopefully it doesn't come to that.

[Duality]

So lemme get this straight. If I download a song onto iPod...and later on I do not want it...and I use iTunes method of deleting it, it still stays on the harddrive?

So does it still take up memory for something that should of been "deleted"?
No, its deleted. The data is still there, however, those positions on the disk platter are marked to be overwritten. Data that you haven't deleted is not marked to be overwritten. This is how most hard drives work. The data is not physically removed unless you do something akin to a full format.

[Dualist]

Well, this guy that my brother works with told him to format the iPod through Windows in the Computer Management area. So I did that, and it fucked the iPod bad. I tried to do what the manual says to reset the iPod (toggle the Hold switch on and off, then press Play/Pause and Menu at the same time), and that didn't do anything. The manual also said to plug the iPod into your PC and use the iPod Updater to restore it to factory default. I tried that, and the iPod Updater wouldn't acknowledge the fact that the iPod was plugged in, even though Windows does.

So, I took the iPod back to the Apple Store. Second iPod down. However, the person at the "Genius Bar" figured out how to get the iPod operational again, so tomorrow I venture to my brother's again to finally wrap up this fucking fiasco. If I have any troubles whatsoever that I cannot resolve, I'm going to move onto another MP3 player. Hopefully it doesn't come to that.


You have got to be kidding. I've never had those problems...that's probably beucase I never had to reformat the iPod for Windows.

What version do you have Larry, I know you have the 40 GB. But mine says its iPod + Hp.

Duality: Aww I see thanks :)

[Larry]

I have the Mac + PC 4th generation 40GB iPod. When you first get the iPod, it isn't formatted for Windows even though it's the Windows-capable model. It comes formatted for Mac. However, what I failed to remember, is when you put in the iPod software CD the iPod formats itself for Windows. So the formatting part of the iPod wasn't what was the matter .. it was just that the last one had a fucked up harddrive or whatever.

Fortunately, I had all my music onto the iPod in half an hour. 1,600+ songs and it was on it in no time. I quickly checked to make sure the music indeed played, and all the artists and songs were intact. The only problem remaining is that the electricty in my room really, really sucks. It killed off my motherboard and video card in my PC for fuck's sake. So I borrowed a spare APC Battery Back-UPS ES 350 from my brother. I'm letting it charge, and then I can finally just listen to my music in my room for the first time in over a month.

[Dualist]

"1,600+ songs "

Damn, are all of these from CD's you ripped and put straight to the iPod?

[Larry]

"1,600+ songs "

Damn, are all of these from CD's you ripped and put straight to the iPod?
A mix of CDs and downloaded MP3s. I guess I have an equal amount of both.

Now I have about 1,800+ songs. I downloaded around 200 songs off of a friend through AIM and here I am. I'm glad I stuck out this iPod thing, because it working is cool. It's amazing how fast iTunes is. All those 200 songs took only about 5 minutes to put onto the iPod.

[Emptythought]

That's insane.

Synchronization goes both ways. Apparently, nobody at Apple used a PDA. Hmm, because i accidently deleated all of my songs on my comp once, and it auto-copied them all back from the ipod..

but that was a 3rd gen ipod.. so maybe its diffrent

This is how most hard drives work. The data is not physically removed unless you do something akin to a full format. *you mean a low level format, and even those dont really remove it that much. theres many programs that could still get it back unless you wrote over about 10 times.

[Larry]

Hmm, because i accidently deleated all of my songs on my comp once, and it auto-copied them all back from the ipod..
Are you sure? Usually MP3 players won't upload music from itself onto a PC because of copyright laws or whatever. Usually you can only download music to it. But in any case, with the 4G iPod, if you have it set for iTunes to automatically manage your shit, it'll make the iPod reflect your iTunes Library.

[Duality]

Not exactly.

A low level format is the formatting method that creates the sectors and tracks on a hard drive, which is done at the factory. It was common to use a low level format to extend to the life of old MFM drives, but PCs can no longer perform a low level format, as it would destroy the disk.

What you're thinking of is a zero-fill format, which writes the entire data area of the disk with 0 binary digits.

[Dualist]

It's amazing how fast iTunes is.

Oh I know, and how fast it converts your CD to AAC format is unbelievable.

That's kind of why I picked an iPod over any other MP3 player, becuase this program, iTunes, can do all this stuff really fast...and well I haven't seen an MP3 player come with a tool like this.

[Octocamo]

Oh I know, and how fast it converts your CD to AAC format is unbelievable.

That's kind of why I picked an iPod over any other MP3 player, becuase this program, iTunes, can do all this stuff really fast...and well I haven't seen an MP3 player come with a tool like this.My brother's Muvo Slim MP3 Player app is faster at converting than Itunes.

I use Itunes for buying/organizing my music.

Edit:

Are you sure? Usually MP3 players won't upload music from itself onto a PC because of copyright laws or whatever. Usually you can only download music to it. But in any case, with the 4G iPod, if you have it set for iTunes to automatically manage your shit, it'll make the iPod reflect your iTunes Library. My bro's MP3 player lets him record FM radio, then upload it to his PC.....

[Larry]

My bro's MP3 player lets him record FM radio, then upload it to his PC.....
Yeah but that's a little different than what I'm talking about. I mean if you put an MP3 or any digital music onto your MP3 player, usually it won't let you take that song from it and put it back on the computer. My old MP3 player said it couldn't upload songs from it to the PC because of copyright laws. Maybe there's certain ways to get around that though, or maybe those laws are just overlooked now.

[Octocamo]

Isn't it "your" music if you put it on the MP3 player in the first place?

[Larry]

Isn't it "your" music if you put it on the MP3 player in the first place?
Yeah, lol.