iPod noob questions

I know I’m behind the times…I just got my very first iPod.

Its been something i knew I was going to do for awhile, but put it off. Its an 80 GB Classic IPod, and so far I’m happy with it. But I have questions I hope someone can help me with.

  1. I’ve copied a lot of my own CDs to itunes and put them on the ipod by making smart playlists and I usually just put the thing on “shuffle songs”. But if I were to want to hear say “Pink Floyd: The Wall” or “Marillion: Misplaced Childhood” I’d prefer to listen to the albums in order. But I don’t see an option to “play album”. Is there some mistake I’ve made indownloading, or am I missing something?

  2. I downloaded the album artwork on itunes. How do I put it on the ipod?

  3. I have music files on another PC that I got from Rhapsody. is there anyway to copy them to itunes so I can put them on the ipod? I can always copy them to a CD and then to itunes, but is thee a way I can open rhapsody, then copy the files into itunes?

I’ve had my iPod for a long time, but I’m no expert. I’ll try to help you out.

  1. You can simply choose to play the album via selecting it under the Music menu. But I’m suspecting here that you’re asking about how to play a double disc album with a single selection. What I’ve done (though there may be a better solution) is to make a smart playlist consisting of both album #1 and album #2, then making sure the songs are in the correct sequence. I did this for my ripped CDs of Les Miz.

  2. The artwork download to your iPod is automatic, at least for me. I don’t know if there is some setting that would prevent that from occuring.

  3. I have no idea.

  1. I’m not familiar with Rhapsody. Are the songs stored as mp3s in a particular directory? If they are (or I think in a couple of other common formats), you can go to File > Add Folder* and they’ll all get copied directly into iTunes. You can also load individual songs using the Add Song* command directly above it.

If they’re stored as wvs or a few other formats, you’ll have to burn them to CD. The easiest way to know which formats will or won’t load is to simply try it and see if the songs appear in your library.

*I don’t have iTunes on my work computer, so I can’t look up the exact wording. It should be pretty obvious which menu items I mean.

If, indeed, the double album situation is the issue, what I do is select all the songs from the double album and right click to edit the song info (you’ll get a warning message that you’re changing the info on multiple songs - click Yes), then make sure all the info (album, artist, and cover art) is edited to be identical for all the songs.

If you’re just having trouble locating the menu selection for album or artist, as opposed to song, just scroll around and look or read the manual - it’s all explained there.

Rhapsody uses a proprietary format, and I’m not aware of any legal direct converters. Burning to CD and then ripping to mp3 is the best solution I know of.

Ah. That makes sense. I never thought of that approach. I have lots of double albums that I’ve ripped from CD. I think I’ll try this for all of them.

For multi-disc collections, what you should do is to properly set the disc number data. First make sure that the album name and artist is properly set as flex727 suggests. Then for the first disc, set all the tracks to disc “1” of “2” (assuming a 2-CD set) and for the second disc, set all tracks to disc “2” of “2”. All the tracks should now play properly in the correct order from both the iTunes and iPod “Album” listing.

No, do it in the reverse order. If you first set the album and artist to be the same, you’ll have a hard time selecting all the disc-1 tracks so that you can change the disc number.

True. I usually do this before ripping the disc, so there’s no question of mixing tracks.

Another important thing to remember is that the “shuffle songs” setting on the iPod is global, i.e. if it’s on, it’s on for everything, every playlist, every album; no matter how you start something playing, you’ll be shuffling.

As opposed to iTunes, where the shuffle setting is set individually on each playlist. I can have my “Surf Music” playlist shuffled, and my “Evolution of Rock” playlist not shuffled, and they’ll stay that way.

So on the iPod, if you normally have it shuffling songs, and then you decide you want to listen to an album in order, you first have to go into settings and turn shuffle off (or at least to “shuffle albums”). Then when you’ve had your fix of The Wall, and want to go back to shuffling, you have to go back into settings and change it back. Kind of a pain; I’d like to see a way to toggle it easily from anywhere.

I guess there’s a difference in iPods. The OP had the classic, but I just got my first iPod about a month ago, the Touch, and on the “playing” screen it has a “button” for shuffle. Plus, when selecting what you want to hear, you choose the Artist then the Album, and on that screen you can tap the first song to begin playing them in order, or, at the top of the song list, is the “shuffle” choice to shuffle all the songs on that album.

I guess it’s different for the classic.