iTunes & iPod question

Mundane Pointless Stuff I Must Share (MPSIMS)
#1

I love my iPod. I HATE iTunes with every fiber of my being.

Ok, when it launches it says that some songs in the library could not play because they can’t be found. But it doesn’t tell me which songs. So I’m trying to get this ready to resync it to my iPod but I actually want ALL THE DAMNED SONGS so it would be nice to know WHICH ONES it can’t find so I can FIND THEM. Any ideas?

Also, I seem to remember from last time I’ve only done this twice ever because I hate it so much) that it was really damned hard to figure out exactly how to make it put the stuff ONTO my iPod. Can someone explain it to me? I may figure it out on my own when I get to that point but if I don’t, I’d rather have an answer waiting rather than getting all irritated lol.

#2

Look for a gray exclamation point next to certain songs in the library. These are the ones that iTunes cannot find. You’ll have to manually adjust to pointer to wherever the file is on your HD.

My iPod automatically updates as soon as I connect it to my cradle. You can also choose “Update songs on iPod” in the File menu (assuming this is Windows.)

#3

Ok, so it can’t find EVERY FREAKING SONG ON THE WHOLE LIST. All 2500 of them have a grey ! next to them. Is there an “options” somewhere where I can point out the folder where these things are (and always have been) kept?

Also, while I have made playlists in the past, I can’t figure out how to do it now. I can make any number of empty, useless playlists, but can’t put songs into them. Some webpage that I got to from the very useless HELP menu said to select my songs, THEN hit “create playlist” but that just made… you guessed it! Another empty playlist.

Anyone want a small pile of cracked and broken electronics which appears to have an “apple” logo on one of the fragments? ::::pissed::::

I really don’t have 4 hours to do this.

#4

If you have a blank playlist, you can drag a song from the library or whatever list they’re on already to the blank list, and it will show up. As for changing where it looks for the music, I’m not sure if this will do what you’re looking for, but under Edit -> Preferences, “Advanced” tab, there’s a place to change the location of the “iTunes Music folder”. The other way to do this is to actually open the folder containing all your music, select the files and/or subfolders, and drag them to a blank playlist (You can start by deleting everything from the Library playlist, as it’s obviously not doing you any good now, and then drag everything there). Depending on how much you have, it may take a minute or two.

#5

A lot of problems were solved once my husband figured out that the drivers/software/something wasn’t smart enough to figure out that I had more drive letters than physical drives because of shared network drives. So it was trying to assign drive letter F to my iPod, but F is our data drive on the linux box downstairs… so it was getting all 40 flavors of confused.

He figured out how to assign it drive letter H and things got much better.

In all the struggling, however, my iPod became completely hosed and had to be restored to factory settings, erasing everything. le sigh

#6

Hi hon,

Lots of Floyd on that list I hope.

#7

I’ve had some luck with the ‘consolidate library’ function (under the Advanced menu).

#8

There are 78 Pink Floyd songs :slight_smile:

#9

Drag and dro, man. Songs to iPod / songs to playlists / songs to iTunes / anything to anywhere. If it can go there, it can be dragged and dropped there.
It’s inherently a Mac program, and whenever dealing with Mac stuff Occam’s razor applies.

#10

One bit of (IMHO) advice, turn off the auto-synch. I hated that. I like to decide what I put on my computer and what I actually want on my iPod. After 2 hours of auto-synch, I decided to remove that control from iTunes. It’s been smooth sailing since then (except 40GB is far from big enough and that’s why I’m cycling music in and out and need to make sure it doesn’t delete or add unnecessary music).

#11

checks pants nope, not a man :wink:
The drag and drop wasn’t working. Nothing was working. That is why I was so frustrated. Drag & Drop was obviously the first thing I tried. The whole problem boiled down to the drive letter confusion, and it just not being smart enough to realize I had mounted drives from other computers using those drive letters. It works fine now.

stpauler: Turning off auto-sync was the first thing I did.