How to transfer existing MP3 collection to an iPod?

pealy

I've just bought an iPod and I'm struggling to find an easy way to get my 20GB of music onto it quickly. I've installed iTunes but can't really find a way of asking it to scan my existing folders and just create the albums on the iPod.

I've looked at previous posts and tried using ephPod as suggested, this has allowed me to copy albums one at a time but what I really want to do is just have the iPod synchronise with the 'my music' folder and reflect the albums which are in there.

I have all my CD's ripped to MP3 and stored on my hard drive with winamp playlists. Each is in a different folder eg:

My Documents\My Music\Air[Moon Safari]
My Documents\My Music\Radiohead[The Bends]
My Documents\My Music\Radiohead[OK Computer]

Etc.

I've been looking on iPodLounge.com and see that there are many alteratives to iTunes but it's impossible to work out which will be suitable (if any).

Any thoughts?

Dude

You can do it manually, although it may take some time. Open iTunes go to File>Add Folder to Library

pealy

Dude wrote:

You can do it manually, although it may take some time. Open iTunes go to File>Add Folder to Library

I'm pretty sure I tried this and while it added the tracks okay I didn't see any evidence of it creating any kind of playlist. Addidng asecond folder this way just seemed to add more tracks, it looked like I was going to end up wit just one huge album..

pealy

alexjohnson wrote:

You should be able to import everything just by selecting the enclosing folder

Thanks for the detail, much appreciated. That sounds promising so it looks like I'll have to re-install itunes and see how I get on tonight.

moomintroll_3

You should be able to tell iTunes to let you manage your iPod manually. Then plug in your iPod and drag the 'My Music' folder to it (in iTunes). iTunes will synchronise the folder to the iPod without adding the tracks to the iTunes library. AFAIK, your playlists will not be synchronised so you may need to recreate them on the iPod. Then again, if you're looking at playing album by album then the iPod will do that without playlists - just go music/albums and pick the album you want to listen to.

At least this is what I did when I wanted some pre-existing MP3's copied over without having them added to the main library.

pealy

moomintroll wrote:

You should be able to tell iTunes to let you manage your iPod manually. QUOTE]

Are there some settings in iTunes to allow this? Do I still run iTunes or use Windows Explorer? Do I drage the folder from windows Explorer into iTunes?

Sorry for all the questions but his is *exactly* what I was hoping I could do

firedog_2

pealy wrote:

moomintroll wrote:

You should be able to tell iTunes to let you manage your iPod manually. QUOTE]

Are there some settings in iTunes to allow this?

yes there is. I would ramble on further, but Apple offers a good video introduction:

http://www.apple.com/support/ipod/tutorial/ip_gettingstarted_t3.html

iTunes does a pretty good job of managing your music - it's just a question of trust. What I do think is an under-appreciated feature is Smart Folders - the contents of folders update on the fly. For example, you can create a smart folder with rules such as "Artist=Abba" and every Abba track will appear in that folder - no need for manual organisation!

pealy

firedog wrote:

yes there is. I would ramble on further, but Apple offers a good video introduction:

I'll check it out when I'm back at home this evening.

I think my main problem might be that most of my MP3's don't have ID3 tags. The software I use to organise them uses the folder names and filenames to work out the artist, track etc. I've written something to go back and tag everything but it's going to take a while to run, hopefully it will mean iTunes can handle them better when it's finished..

pealy

alexjohnson wrote:

What makes life easier is if you sync by Playlist as then you don't have to micro-manage quite so much. Alternatively

What exactly is a playlist? Does iTunes create them itself? Do I need to use them or can iTunes work happily with Artist->Album selection?

On the whole I'm just not convinced iTunes is for me, I have about 600 GB of music and only 30 GB of room on the iPod so I really need something to help me manage what I copy to the iPod and what I don't.

I can't quite get my head round the way iTunes works. I'm normally able to use applications out-of-the-box without resorting to manuals and help screens but iTunes has me baffled. I think I'm missing some fundamental concept that makes sense of it (probably because I'm over 30!) Using ephPod has been much easier, after ensuring the tags are there all I need to do is put all the albums in a specific folder and press synch - easy peasy and exactly what I was hoping when I bought the iPod. The drawback is that ephPod doesn't seem to know about pictures or video and I'd love to get album artwork and some of my pictures onto the iPod. Looks like I'll have to persevere with iTunes so when the baby goes to sleep tonight I'm going to get a bottle open and start again.

wonderfullife_2

Hi
Wow what a post, I don't think I've seen one so long, I would think you'd need one of these :beer: after that. Not being to smug but I'm soooo glad I have the Iriver H140, I just drag and drop.
And it deserves a big thanks, even though I don't use an Ipod

pealy

alexjohnson wrote:

Good luck. I think you'll find iTunes very easy to use once you've got it set up right.

Wow! That really was a post. Thanks alex for spending the time, it was very much appreciated even if it's taken me so long to respond - I've been busy getting it all working. I am now using iTunes and I'm 99% happy with what's going on. Just in case anyone reads this and wants to know how it all turned out, here's how I'm using it:

All my music is on a server on various disks stored in various subdirectories using fixed naming conventions (the artist and title are the folder name, track no, track artist and song title in the filename). I use my own software to manage & play the music. I used to update the ID3 tags with this software too but my iTunes doesn't like the way my API numbers the tracks so I've started to use a shareware app called MP3 Tag Studio which can batch create ID3 v1 and v2 tags from filenames.

I've updated my own software with a new checkbox for albums I want to have on my iPod. Periodically, a process runs on my laptop which checks what has been marked for iPod and makes sure it's all in a certain subdirectory.

In iTunes I just need to make sure it synchronises with this single directory. This is something it seems to be doing quite nicely at the moment. The process of adding album artwork has to be done manualy for each album but that's not so bad. The key has been ensuring the ID3 tags were present & correct.

The one issue I've had is that iTunes will refuse to copy some tracks because it says my iPod can't play them. So far this has been beacause they were encoded at a low (64k?) bit-rate. Re-doing them at a higher bitrate fixed the problem but it was really hard to work out what files were affected and what the problem was. (incidentally, using ephPod to transfer the original file to my iPod was fine and teh tracks played fine, iTunes underestimates the capability of my iPod)

On the whole iTunes is much slower than ephPod for copying the files but the album artwork and photos makes up for it.

Next step is to try and get a video on there, so far I've got iTunes to convert one but it lost the sound..