What the hell is WITH this godforsaken devil of a program? I’ve got songs I’ve downloaded (legally) onto my ipod from an old computer. On my new one,I’ve made a compilation in an ipod playlist, and now I try to burn it onto a CD and NOTHIN! Bupkus. Zilch. Can’t copy it, can’t cut and paste it, nothin.
Why? What’s the harm in ME, using the songs I bought, for my OWN FUCKING ENJOYMENT, YOU PIECE OF SHIT?
What, are you afraid the RIAA won’t make their 2.1nil on my copy of a copy of MY music!?!?
Sonofabitch. It’s no wonder Apple’s No. 2. Bastards.
This is the BBQ Pit. Tech support is three doors down.
That said, your problem is a big vague. What format are your songs in? Did you download them from a service, or did you buy them from the iTunes Music Store? Did you create the playlist on the computer, or on the iPod?
Burned two CDs last night without any problems myself…
Well… shit. If I understand your issue correctly, you could have a couple problems.
You transfered the songs to your iPod, then your computer crapped out on you and you had to reinstall iTunes (on a new computer)?
Make sure that this copy of iTunes is authorized for the same iTMS account you used to buy the songs.
You need to make sure the songs are actually in the iTunes Library, not just on the iPod. To limit piracy Apple made the iPod software work one way… songs go in, they don’t come out. If you need to, you can get around this by making the invisible music folder on the iPod visible and manually copying them into iTunes.
Google is your friend if you need to know how. Hopefully you had backups which would make life easier.
And now there are any number of freeware programs which will extract files off of an iPod and onto your computer. Since the legality of this is questionable, I won’t link to any specific programs, but they’re pretty easy to find on VersionTracker and the like.
Getting music off your iPod and onto a computer was a trick discovered ten minues after the first iPod hit the streets (the music is stored in a set of hidden directories). Anyone halfway competent around the Apple Finder and/or Windows Explorer could find the music files on an iPod.
Didn’t I make it crystal clear that it was possible to get music off an iPod, but that it isn’t default functionality? I even told him exactly what he had to do. I just didn’t give him step-by-step directions.
To beat you guys to the punch, I could also have told him how to get a common line of self-serve gas pumps to dispense gas for free or how to open most ATMs in under three minutes, but I didn’t.
Yes, this “anti-piracy” measure is extremely weak. Yes, it limits iPod music piracy about as well as the US Border Patrol limits illegal immigrants and drugs. However, it was enough to appease the RIAA assholes.
Crap, now I’ve let my geek rage get me way off track… My original point was that he needed to make sure that he actually had the songs on his computer because the OP made it seem as though they could possibly only be on the iPod.
All I really care about is whether ** buttonjockey308 ** can burn his CD. I hope he was able to.
This sort of thing is why, after purchasing approximately one CD’s worth of music from iTunes, it is advisable to burn it to CD immediately, rip the CD using a separate program (MusicMatch or WinAmp work well for this), delete the nigh-useless bastardized MP4s iTunes gives you, and add the normal MP3 files to your iTunes library for your listening/iPod-uploading pleasure.
If you don’t do this, the iTunes “security features” will bite you in the ass, one way or another. Given the ease of the process I’ve described above, it’s almost as if Apple realized it couldn’t fight piracy effectively and decided to piss off its paying customers just for the hell of it instead.
Wait, I had a question while we are on the subject. My original iTunes Music directory has some purchased music in it. I recently setup an music server on a different machine. This server does not utilize the “Share Music” option in iTunes. I basically just physically dumped all of the music files that my family has collected in their various individual Music directories into one big centralized directory. I fixed up the permissions and created the appropriate symlinks to make iTune happy in all other aspects except when it comes to purchasing music from the iTunes store. The iTunes music store is not happy with my new choice of Music directory. What do I need to do in terms of rectifing this situation. I assume it has to do with deauthorization/authorization.
And because the simple solution may be the one that’s needed here:
If you’ve already transferred the music files between computers and put the purchased songs into your iTunes library on the new computer, then all you need to do is authorize them for that computer. To do that, all you’ve got to do is play them (all the way through, as I discovered to my cost) in iTunes, then you can do whatever the hell you like with them.
Don’t forget to deauthorize them from your old machine though, you can only put your purchased songs onto so many computers.
This is exactly what I’ve been trying to do (share music among users in my household). I moved the music files to a non-personal directory and tried resetting the folder, just as you did, but it didn’t work – nothing showed up.
iTunes has been a great program for me, as a jukebox and for burning CDs from (I don’t have an iPod), apart from one problem:
When I buy a song off iTunes, and it comes in .m3a format, I want to burn it to CD so I can listen to it in my discman, play it on the radio show etc. etc. So far so good.
However, if I then add another song from somewhere else in my library to the CD so I’m not burning and finalizing a CD-R with just one track on it, it buggers up!
To get around this without ending up with a one-track coaster, I have to burn the track to a CD-RW, rip it back to iTunes in mp3 format, and then burn my compilation CD on CD-R which I can then play in my Discman.
