So I just got the new video Ipod Nano for my birthday to replace my first generation 4 gig Ipod Nano that I had before. Apparently there is no way to just click and drag all the stuff from my old Ipod to the new one, but I also only seem to be able to get music on the new Ipod if I have created a playlist in the main Itunes window and then sync the whole playlist to the Nano. Am I missing something? Did they change the software? Or is there just a setting I don’t know about? Any other way of moving stuff from one Ipod to the other?
There’s a way, but it’s kind of a pain in the ass.
You have to use the iPod like a flash drive. Browse to it from the My Computer thinger, then show hidden files and folders. Drag and drop the files from the iPod into your iTunes folder.
The file names will be totally fucked up and meaningless to you (at least I think so, I only did it once to get some music from a friend’s iPod), but if you want to spend the time, you can change the information back.
Hope that helped a little. Like I said, I only did it once, so I may have missed something, but that’s the basics of it.
You say you’re using iTunes, so I’ll just throw this out there in case you missed it: When your new iPod is connected, click on it in the sidebar. That should bring up a a summary of the iPod in the main window and you should have a row of tabs along the top, one of which is “Music”. Click on that tab, and the options are to sync “All songs and playlists” or just “Selected playlists”. It sounds like you may have wound up with just “selected” somehow. Click on “All songs and playlists” and your new iPod should download everything in iTunes.
Thanks for the quick replies. I’d rather not sync everything in Itunes, as I have something like 20GB of music. I only want to pick a couple of thousand out of that list and sync those songs. I’d really like to find some way of exporting the playlists from the first Ipod, then import those into the new one.
I’ve used the method you descirbe for finding one or two songs metronome, but I really don’t want to have to rename 3 GB worth of songs that way.
Oh, no kidding, I didn’t even have the patience to rename two albums. :> I hope somebody comes along with an easier way, 'cause renaming them sucks.
I’ll bump this once for Monday morning crowd. Any other suggestions?
Do you have the old iPod’s playlists set up already in iTunes? (and if not, how did you set them up?).
Assuming you do have them in iTunes, why can’t you simply connect the new iPod, then in iTunes click on the new iPod’s icon (the mlddle of the screen, below the iTunes store), then on the tabbed area to the right, click on Music, click “sync music” (it is probably already checked by default), then choose the desired playlists.
Or am I missing something entirely? 
I’m missing it too. As it happens, I just got a new iPod this weekend. All I did was plug it in, and iTunes automatically launched and set me on the path to registering the iPod and then synching it. All the stuff that was on my old iPod was now on the new one, absolutely no problems.
Nope, with the old iPod Nano, I was able to drag the music directly to the Ipod into the “Music” folder. Then create new playlists right on the iPod and click and drag the music onto each one of the playlists.
The “drag the music into the music folder” sounds familiar, though I thought the only playlist you could create on the Nano was to add stuff to the “on the go” playlist (by pressing the center button, I think).
I’ve got a first-generation Nano; which version do you have? I must be missing a feature.
Hmm - a bit of googling is my friend:
From this, I’d expect that if you sync to iTunes, you’d see your “on the go” playlists in iTunes. If you did this, would your song titles etc. appear? or would it just contain arcane references to filenames? I’ve always used iTunes to manage the music, rather than the drag-to-folder method, so I don’t know how that works.
I’ll have to check when I get home. Probably second generation. I think it’s an upgrade to either iTunes or the firmware in the iPod that did it. There used to be an option to “manually manage your music” which would let you just click and drag music to the iPod and then create playlists from there. Now you did have to create the playlist in iTunes, but you could create it on the iPod itself…if that makes sense. You know how your iPod shows up on the left side when you plug it in? I used to be able to click on the iPod, then select “New Playlist” from the menu bar and it would create a playlist on the iPod. Now when I do that it just makes a new playlist in iTunes. Very irritating.
It seems to me what you are missing is the little box on (I think…no itunes on work computer to check for sure…it could be on the “music” tab…) the main info screen of the Nano that says “manually manage music and videos” or something to that effect. This is the box to check if you don’t want the ipod to auto-sync playlists…manually managing the music allows the drag and drop you are talking about. I think that should take care of your issue…
Huh…I thought I had checked that on the main tab. Which was why I couldn’t understand why it wouldn’t let me. So one problem solved. I can now drag music from the iTunes library directly to the new iPod. However I still can’t see a way of getting the playlists from the old iPod to the new one. Any thoughts on that?
From what I can tell, this is pretty much impossible without some 3rd party software…He’res a detailed iLounge article explaining the whole thing in more detail than you probably want…
Well crap. Thanks for the help JackofHearts. I guess on the bright side this will force me to make the playlists in iTunes, so any future iPods will be easier to build. sigh…oh well.