Background – I’ve never had an iPod, for the sole reason that they do not support Rhapsody subscriptions which is my preferred way to get music. I have used Creative Zens, which are pretty simple to get music onto, I used either the Rhapsody program or Windows Media Player and it’s a pretty straightforward process – I select the files I want to transfer, click on transfer, and it’s done. I also use the Zencast podcast program and it’s just as simple: I download the podcasts, select the ones I want on my player, and click on transfer. Simple.
So my files consist of three types:
Music files ripped from CDs I own, in mp3 or wma format, both non-DRM
Podcasts I’ve downloaded, also in unprotected mp3 format.
Music files I’ve downloaded from Rhapsody, in a DRM format.
Now two things have happened. My Creative Zen has died, and Rhapsody has an app that allows accessing and even downloading files onto an iPod Touch, though I understand that this is through the app and not through iTunes. So the Rhapsody music I’ve previously downloaded on to my computer will have to be downloaded again into a Touch, rather than transferred from my computer. That’s fine with me. So I’ve decided to get the iPod Touch very soon.
That leaves me with two types of files I will need to transfer to the Touch: mp3 or wma files I ripped from CDs, and podcasts.
I have not bought the Touch yet… I’ve had issues with Quicktime in the past (in the end, it was actually easier to reinstall Windows than fuck with the problems that Quicktime caused, but that was about 3 years ago) so I downloaded iTunes over the weekend to see if I would have any problems with it. Fortunately, it seems to be working ok and hasn’t caused any problems , but it also didn’t discover any of my files, which I have an a different drive than my C drive. But it didn’t crash my PC like Quicktime did years ago, so the Touch is a go.
OK, all of that for my two questions:
What is the best way to arrange my music files that I have ripped from CDs? Right now they are in the following form J://Music/Artist/Album/tracks. I like this, and I doubt I’ll be adding more music in this form very rarely (with Rhapsody I don’t buy CDs any more). I’ll add the music I want to the Ipod once and only rarely change it. I’m assuming that iTunes will find the music when I direct it to scan my J drive.
Is using iTunes to manage podcasts any good? I don’t always listen to them right away, I may transfer a dozen or so to my Zen and not listen to them for weeks, only to finally listen to most at one time. I recall hearing complaints about iTunes deleting older podcasts, is this still valid? I don’t mind downloading them with a 3rd party podcast program and transferring with iTunes later if that’s what I need to do.
iTunes doesn’t do WMA format- windows proprietary and all that jazz. It doesn’t matter how or what directory you have your music in to begin with. You still need to “import” it into iTunes. Now you can let it copy it to its own directory structure or you can tell it to not copy it and just leave it where you imported it from. Any newly ripped CDs will be put in the iTunes directory structure however. (They aren’t hard to find or figure out however.)
iTunes is ideal for Podcasts and you will see many podcasts have additional features if you use iTunes to download and listen to them. (If you don’t listen to a podcast for a month; however, it will stop downloading new ones unless you override the setting (googleable) or just click that button to tell it to resume downloading them.)
I should add that if you don’t have Metadata associated with the tracks themselves, when you import your music you will not have any artist or album or etc. data associated with the track, but you’ll find this out soon enough.
I just broke down and got another iPod after not having one for 4 years; I just gave up fighting the wave that is Apple because the Nano is pretty neat and fits my needs. My problem is albumn art, as in unless I got the songs from the iTunes store it will not load up the albumn art from my previous collection. anyone know how to do that?
Thanks for the replies. I have the iPod now, and I just realized that I don’t know if it matters which computer I have iTunes on, the desktop or laptop. Can I have it on both?
Edit: Never mind, I googled it. It’s not near as indifferent as the Zen is, the Zen didn’t give a shit what computer the files came from.
I was enjoying the iPod quite a bit, I installed a few apps (Rhapsody, Pandora, Google Earth, iHeart radio and the SOMA FM player) directly to the iPod, and the Rhapsody app works pretty much like I expected, though it seems to take it’s sweet time downloading tracks and sometimes hangs up, but I eventually got every Rhapsody track I wanted on it. Then I decided to download a bunch of the music (ripped from CDs) I have on my computer to it. I had it set up to manually synch since I wanted to pick and choose what to add.
So I went through and added the albums I wanted, hit ‘synch’ and iTunes proceeded to delete all five apps and every single rhapsody track (about 5 GB worth) from the iPod.
WTF? I’m seriously pissed off right now- why the fuck did it delete the shit I put on the iPod? I wanted iTunes to do one thing, add some tracks; it did that plus something I definitely DIDN’T want it to do.
“Sync” doesn’t mean “Copy across”. “Sync” means “Synchronise”, match the iTunes and iPod libraries. The apps weren’t in iTunes so it took them off the iPod.
Ok, but the iPod lets me download apps directly to the player though wi-fi via the app store application on the player. What is the purpose of this if iTunes is going to delete them the next time I connect the iPod to my computer? That just doesn’t make sense.
Yeah, it’s SUPPOSED to stop and warn you during the sync that there are purchases on the device that are not on the computer and ask if you want to transfer them, but the fact is that it doesn’t always do that. Well, that and it’s a prompt and some people just blow past it without considering what it is saying.
No, no prompt. What is odd is that after iTunes removed the apps from the iPod, the apps were in my iTunes. It’s not like I had to go back to the app store and download them again. If Cazzle is right, iTunes removed the apps on my iPod because they were no in iTunes, but after they were removed, they were in iTunes.
Re-downloading the Rhapsody tracks is turning out to be a pain, as the iPod turns off the Rhapsody app if it is idle too long. Hey, it’s not idle, it’s downloading - leave it up and running please.
Then click on the name of the iPod, which will get the Summary screen showing the iPod, version and options. At the top of that are file folder tabs. Go to Apps, or Applications (depending on version). Are those apps listed and checked off to sync? If not, then check them off so they get synced back regularly, and hit Apply.
Once you make the switch to iTunes, you’ll no longer need to bother with that. iTunes will sort your music for you in the program itself - or rather, you will be able to sort your music within iTunes any way you want, and you won’t be beholden to one specific sort priority.
Thanks for the advice and information, but holy fuck this is frustrating as hell. The iPod is refusing to download about 25% of the tracks that iTunes deleted for me. Why the hell won’t it do what I want it to do? The tracks are ‘pending download’ but I have a working 11 MBPS connection, and it will stream the tracks. Just download them please.
I’ve reached my limit of ‘authorized computers’ for my itunes account. The thing is that I don’t have access to the other PC’s to de-authorize them. iTunes is telling me that I’d have to de-authorize all of the PC’s on file.
My question is if I de-authorize all PC’s from the account, what happens to my data on the one PC where I do still access itunes? Can I re-authorize it without losing data?
I like to have the artwork and I believe I have a couple of things can be done to address this. In iTunes go to the Advanced option and select Get Album Artwork. This scans all of your songs and, after the usual threat to report you to Steve Jobs or the RIAA, assigns the album artwork.
The ones it does not find, it assigns some musical note. I get this when I rip some songs from a CD that has not yet made it’s way into iTunes. To get around this, I search the iTunes Store for the song and make sure the artist and album name match what shows up in my playlist. If they don’t, I rename them ( click on the text in the playlist to rename it ). Repeat for all songs then repeat the Get Album Artwork option. There are some artist that do not have their music loaded so you may still end up with some songs that lack a album cover.
Yes, it can be time consuming and in some cases the album artwork might be the song on a different album, but is is something you can try.
My problem is albumn art, as in unless I got the songs from the iTunes store it will not load up the albumn art from my previous collection. anyone know how to do that?