Anyone know anything about iPod?

Factual Questions
1

Okay, I’ve screwed up my daughter’s iPod. I have searched all over Apple’s worthless support site and cannot find a way to resolve the problem. I have followed all the directions in the manuals, in the “Help” menu, everything.

Here’s the deal:

In an effort to recover some hard disk space, I have moved all of our music files from the computer’s hard drive and onto an external drive. I didn’t think about iTunes at the time, so it moved with everything else. Therefore, the next time iTunes ran, it couldn’t find any of the music. So far, that makes sense. I moved the iTunes files back to its default location C:\Documents and Settings\Owner\My Documents\My Music\iTunes\iTunes Music . Since that’s where it wants the music, that’s where I put it. No dice. It won’t find it there. I went into Preferences -> Advanced and pointed iTunes to the new location of the iTunes music. No luck with that, either. I can, however, import one song at a time (from any location). Given that she has over 1000 songs, that’s a bit more time than I think is reasonable. I have tried Advanced ->Consolidate library. That’s what the online instructions said to do. That did not appear to do anything at all. It certainly didn’t fix the problem. I have updated iTunes to the latest software version. That didn’t help.

The only thing left is to actually connect the iPod. I suspect, however, that iTunes will update the iPod by removing all the songs from it, as well (and leaving the two songs I manually imported into iTunes). That is unacceptable as well.

I’m not concerned about actually losing the songs. In fact, they’re better backed up than ever before. I have them on the internal hard drive, the external hard drive, and the iPod itself. Ideally, I want the songs on the external drive and the iPod. My internal drive is a tad small and I’d like to put all large files on the much larger external drive. If I have to use the internal, though, I can live with it.

If it helps, we’re talking about a 30GB iPod, running iTunes 6.0.4.2 on a PC running Windows XP/SP2. The external hard drive is NTFS and has no problems in delivering other files, including .wma music files (and manually importing iTunes files.)

Any suggestions? A teenage girl’s entire lifetime of happiness hangs in the balance.

2

First of all, if you can add individual songs 1 at a time, you should be able to add entire folders the same way. Just drag the folder onto the iTunes’ “Library” icon.

As for managing the files, there are many strategies, but I’d recommend one of these two:

Option A:
[ol]
[li]In iTunes, change the library location to an empty or non-existing folder on the external drive. We’re going to move all your music files here.[/li][li]Select the “Keep iTunes music folder organized” and “Copy files to iTunes Music Folder when adding to library” options, if they aren’t selected already.[/li][li]Import all your songs by dragging one of the current music folders to iTunes. This will take some time.[/li][li]Delete the original folder. You can delete both of the original folders, because all your music files have now been copied to the new directory you specified above. (But double check this before deleting the original files.)[/li][/ol]

Option B:
[ol]
[li]In iTunes, change the library location to an empty or non-existing folder on the external drive. We’re not moving all the music, but this will be the default location to save the files when ripping or downloading files.[/li][li]Make sure the “Copy files to iTunes Music Folder” option is not selected.[/li][li]Import all your songs by dragging the music folder on the external drive to iTunes. iTunes will add all the music files to the list but the files will not be moved.[/li][li]That’s it. Don’t delete the music folder on the external drive.[/li][/ol]

3

YES!!! That did it!! Thanks so much. You’d think that Apple would have dropped that helpful information in the help somewhere. I created a new, empty iTunes folder on the external drive and pointed iTunes toward it. Then, I dragged the old iTunes onto the Library icon. About a minute later, we were back in business. She still has to rebuild some genre lists, but that’s no big deal.

Thanks. If you have any music or education questions I can help with, give a shout.

4

If it only took “about a minute,” you probably ended up doing the plan B that I outlined above. Your files probably weren’t copied to the new folder you created, so be careful not to delete the original files (the one that you click-and-dragged to iTunes). If you changed your mind and want iTunes to copy those files to the new folder, I believe that’s what “Consolidate library” does.

5

Really. I’ll look into that when I get home this evening. I updated her iPod for her and that took about thirty minutes as iTunes painstakingly deleted, then reinstalled each item. Thanks again for your help. My daughter and I are both relieved.

6

Before you muck about with your files again, you might want to connect your iPod and turn off auto-update.

The fact that you cannot AFAIK set an auto-updating iPod to not auto-update without first connecting it and therefore triggering an auto-update is, IMHO, the stupidest thing since, um, something really stupid. Oh, making that Growing Pains spin-off about the basektball coach. What if someone drops your laptop down the sewer?

–Cliffy

7

My post could be a bit more helpful, but I don’t have time now to look it up. There is a way to prevent the auto-update - hold down the ctrl & shift, or alt & shift, or some 2 key combination of the ctrl-alt-shift keys when you connect. You can find the info at ilounge.com, I think.

8

Cool. I’ve turned it off for the time being because I’m between computers right now, but that gives me peace of mind. :wink:

–Cliffy