You Can’t Get There From Here
There are a lot of people who advocate that Apple is ever-so-much-better than Microsoft. There are many people who swear the iPod is a great little device.
Only don't try to transfer your legal, purchased music from a now wiped computer hard drive to a different computer. Because your iPod will not allow it. Your choices are to a) wipe your music off your iPod or b) wipe your music off your iPod.
Every, single song on my daughter's iPod was ripped from a purchased, legal CD. No downloads, no stolen music, no Apple iStore purchases. All legal. But the computer it used to be synced to had to be wiped and the operating system reinstalled. There is now no way to sync her iPod to another computer and salvage her music. So she will have to tediously re-rip all that music back to her pristine, Apple-reformatted iPod. (Or purchase a third party program that may or may not work - none of the trial versions of four different programs did.)
And she will never, ever buy another product from Apple. She's in tears, I'm furious and worst of all, the wife is really angry. Great move, guys.
Excuse me while I go see what Linux has to offer for MP3 player support. Because you are not worth the effort.
Geek Stuff | Gaius Saturday, 12 May , 2007
By RiverRat, Saturday, 12 May , 2007 @ 11:37 pm
This makes no sense to me. I’ve transferred recently 2900 songs to two new computers which were ripped from CDs, installed iTunes, and had 3 iPods update perfectly. What I believe you may not be able to do is update the computers from the iPod, though I’m not sure even that’s true as long as the music was not bought from the iTunes store.
What? you had no data backup for the PC?
In setting up one of my new PC’s I had to reformat and reload a couple of times because of my installation errors. In both cases, I simply moved my backup files to the “My Music” folder, downloaded and installed a new version of iTunes, plugged in the iPods, which were immediately recognized and proceeded to resync including new ripped music, and deleted and new podcasts and photographs.
By John Radway, Sunday, 13 May , 2007 @ 7:36 am
I just can’t resist adding that if you’d had a Mac in the first place, you probably wouldn’t have had to wipe your hard drive.
By tabitharuth, Sunday, 13 May , 2007 @ 8:59 am
Ack–don’t wipe the ipod! If the music is still on the pod there are several ways to transfer it. The easiest is to buyt iGadget (igadgt.com I think–google it) and then she can transfer the songs and the playlists to the computer.
Also explore the ipod like a hard drive and copy everything from it to the computer. They have set it up so it is obnoxious but you can copy the music. The folders are labeled inchoherent things like F10 or something wqually stupid but just transfer them onto the hard drive into the same folder as the music used to be (have to install itunes again first) The songs (but not the playlists) will be there in random weird order. You will have to go through each and put it in a playlist.
The easiest is spending the 30 bucks on iGadget.
Hope this isn’t too late.
By jon spencer, Sunday, 13 May , 2007 @ 10:56 am
I have moved my music between 3 Macs, two iPods and one windows laptop without major problems.
Sometime it took a little bit of a work around.
Forgot to mention that it also went into two external hard drives that I use for backups.
By jon spencer, Sunday, 13 May , 2007 @ 10:59 am
I also back up my pictures and music every couple of months or so to DVD’s.
By skh.pcola, Sunday, 13 May , 2007 @ 11:34 am
Yes, yes…join the Apple cult and live happily ever after! *rolls eyes*
By Anna, Sunday, 13 May , 2007 @ 3:34 pm
From what I understand of your predicament, you had the computer automatically synced to the iPod, which is not necessary. You can turn that off and just manually transfer items to the iPod. Each category (music, podcasts, movies/TV, photos) has its own control. For example, I automatically sync my podcasts, but manually transfer music. I don’t have most of my music files on my computer anymore (transferred them to my external drive which I rarely fire up), but the music in my iPod stays put, even when it’s connected to my computer (or my husband’s computers).
If the computer and iPod are automatically synced, then the iPod will always duplicate the contents of iTunes. So I’m guessing that when you reformatted the hard drive and re-installed iTunes, it asked if you want to automatically sync with the iPod and your daughter said “yes.” That will wipe the iPod’s music files to mirror what’s currently on iTunes.
The iPod is not meant to be a backup for iTunes. At one point, I did decide to move my iPod music to another computer and used a program called Senuti to extract the music directly from the iPod, but that program is Mac only (and free, too).
Anyway, good luck finding a Linux equivalent. I’m sure there must be a system out there that’s better than the iPod and iTunes. If you find it, do let us know.
By Noir, Sunday, 13 May , 2007 @ 11:03 pm
I bought two ipods for the kids. One did not work straight out of the box. It was replaced and now works fine. The other seems to have a battery that only holds a couple of hours charge. Also had to go through the process described by Tabitharuth above on that unit - a total pain.
For my own use I like the Creative Zen Neeon 6 Gig player. Perhaps not as sexy as an ipod, but far more robust in managing files. Works just like a removable hard drive, you create your own folder structure and simply drag and drop. No mucking around with itunes. It also supports wma format. Never had a problem with it. Sounds great.