How the !!!! do you use itunes

jaydeeuk1

Been given the unfortunate job of having to sort a mates ipod out. Not sure which model, its the old fat ugly one with the wheel.

He has a thousand or so tracks on there, about 100 of which he wants to keep, delete the rest, and given me a CD to rip. Haven't got any apple ID details or anything like that.

Went against all my principles and installed itunes. After a thorough shower I then decided to tackle it. In theory, I thought it would be a case of selecting all the aac or mp4 or whatever Apple uses from explorer or itunes, and copy to a folder on my PC, and then rip the CD in one click and have it sync painlessly.

After an hour or so, I've admitted defeat. I tried following a website which said to set options to manually transfer which I've done, the ipod shows as e:\ but each folder in there is blank.

The option to 'backup' the ipod under 'file' is helpfully greyed out, and the sync option warns me that all music on the ipod would be deleted and synced with the ipod library on my pc, which I presume is blank other than the CD I just ripped.

So, how to fook do I do it?

WilliamO

Simply place your music into a folder on your windows desktop (i.e. a folder full of MP3s) and then either right click over the folder and select add to itunes library or go to itunes FILE >> ADD TO LIBRARY. Or simply drag the folder or individual files into iTunes.

jaydeeuk1

But how do I get the music OFF the ipod so I delete the stuff I don't want?

System

jaydeeuk1 wrote: »

But how do I get the music OFF the ipod so I delete the stuff I don't want?

you don't - if you connect it to itunes you can go into the music on it to delete things but you can't actually take the music off the device onto the computer, and I don't think you can burn a cd from the tunes on the ipod - there used to be a piece of software called sharepod which let you take the files off the ipod, there must be a modern equivalent... then you can uninstall itunes right away and use your normal burning software!

googler

jaydeeuk1 wrote: »

But how do I get the music OFF the ipod so I delete the stuff I don't want?

You don't. iTunes does this for you.

As long as you have the music that you want to keep on the iPod in the iTunes library on the PC, then you Sync the whole of the iPod to the iTunes library, and you end up with content on the iPod that mirrors the iTunes library exactly.

It's designed to be a one-way street. The iTunes library on the PC is the Master, the iPod the Slave.

If the only device with the music you want to keep is the iPod, you need to look at third-party software to get the music off the iPod separately so you can load it into iTunes.

Have you got access to the iPod owner's computer? This is what you really need.

Are you charging your friend for your time?

kwikbreaks

On some ethereal plane there is a distinct chuckling coming from the mouth of Steve Jobs between the screams as he gets his butt jabbed with a red hot fork.

wba31

it's to do with copyright protection to stop people transferring music between each others devices for free using your ipod as the portable drive.
Your friend needs to use the original itunes account he set the ipod up on to get files off and rip a cd with them.
Alternatively you need to download a program that will take the music off the ipod, Sinuti is one i know of where you can get a free trial to do this.

You cannot copy tracks off the ipod onto your itunes, only from itunes onto ipod.

jaydeeuk1

googler wrote: »

You don't. iTunes does this for you.

As long as you have the music that you want to keep on the iPod in the iTunes library on the PC, then you Sync the whole of the iPod to the iTunes library, and you end up with content on the iPod that mirrors the iTunes library exactly.

It's designed to be a one-way street. The iTunes library on the PC is the Master, the iPod the Slave.

If the only device with the music you want to keep is the iPod, you need to look at third-party software to get the music off the iPod separately so you can load it into iTunes.

Have you got access to the iPod owner's computer? This is what you really need.

Are you charging your friend for your time?

No, not got access to their PC... Not even sure he has a PC anymore otherwise he'd of done it himself probably.

So lets see if I have this right... There is no way using itunes to get the music off the ipod on to my pc, but there may be some 3rd party software that can do it? How come the backup option is greyed out too?

So do I basically say to him, I can't do it?

securityguy

Actually, if it's an old click-wheel iPod you'll find that the music is in a standard filesystem, and if the owner was a PC user, it'll be FAT32, with the metadata in a little database in a file. Plug the thing into a Linux machine, and you'll find it's there. I used to manage my iPod like this, using my own database and some GNU stuff to convert it into the format the iPod wants.

jaydeeuk1

Cheers securityguy, might try that this afternoon if I can be bothered, will set something up on xenserver.

Toxteth_OGrady

Try Media Monkey or CopyTrans