The minister at my church has just informed me about a loaner program she has with some iPod Shuffles. She loaned me a 1GB iPod Shuffle that has some meditation music on it, and I’m listening to it now.
What I’d like to do is look at the playlist and see what’s on it. I connected it to my USB port (F: ) and turned on iTunes, but iTunes won’t show me the playlist unless I erase everything else in my current playlist and sync the iPod shuffle to it.
So I closed iTunes and went to Windows Explorer, with the intention of looking at it as a removable disk. But now, Windows Explorer is telling me that my drives are (A: ), (B: ), (C: ), (D: ), (E: ), (G: ), (H: ), (I: ), (J: ).
How do I get this thing to let me see what’s on the iPod?
As far as I know, Apple doesn’t really want you using the iPod in that way. Specifically, they don’t want you to see the files on your iPod and/or copy them to other computers.
You can, however, use a third-party program like Anapod Copygear (free trial) to see what’s on the iPod.
The music is in a hidden folder I think “music”. You must enable viewing of hidden files and folders. This is in Tools=> folder options view tab of window that pops up. Apple then copies your music with random file names into random folders for reasons that can charitably be called obscure. Your best option is to use a tool like Reply talks about. Winamp also does a decent job of managing Ipods and will let you see what is on the ipod.
[fanboy plug]
Just wanted to add that not only is Winamp a free “alternative”, it used to the MP3 player. Along with the WWW and IRC, Winamp pretty much jumpstarted the digital audio revolution. It’s what got the average Joe interested in MP3s and digital music. In a way, it’s your iPod’s great granddaddy… so be nice to it
[/fanboy]
I used that extensively to make copying my totally legal files from one computer to another easier, and I never got the name joke. I don’t know whether to thank you or not.
Each iPod only has a limited number of authorizations on it, though, so the minister might have problems if it’s done too many times by other people and he can’t get it to sync with his computer anymore.
The easiest solution is to go and look at the playlist on the minister’s computer.
Just for the record, other iPod models do show playlists. The iPod Shuffle was designed as a low-cost alternative and it’s missing a lot of features. One possibility would be to have at least one non-Shuffle for people who are interested in the music.
