New Ipod user....I need LOTS of help :(

Factual Questions
1

I just bought an Ipod and should be getting it in a few days…
to get a head start i figured i would download itunes and try to figure it out :smack:

ive never used anything apple before and im used to drag and drop. When i put music files into itunes it just throws them all around. They arent with the other songs from that artist/album. Its just a jumbled mess of songs. Will this change when they are synced to the ipod? Also, how do i get the songs onto the ipod?

is there any way that the ipod can be made drap and drop capable? The ipod is an 80gb video. Please help. and sorry for being retarded…im new to ipods…

2

im gonna be getting this on saturday and need it saturday night…thats why i want to know what to do BEFORE hand. also, could someone please explain how to get movies on there? (already formatted or not) thanks!

3

I can’t help you with the movies, since mine’s a Nano, but as far as iTunes…

iTunes will organize your library however you tell it to, whether by song title, artist, genre, etc. You may have to go in and manually edit your MP3 tags, depending on how you obtained each individual MP3.

I personally like iTunes and find it quite intuitive.

However, many, many users hate it and refuse to use it at all, except for legally downloading music. For them, the program Anapod Explorer is much easier and more intuitive. It gives you drag and drop functions. Basically it looks just like any other window in Windows XP. You can try it out for free, IIRC, and if you choose, buy the pro version.

Your song list in the iPod will be organized by artist, song, whatever. The iPod menus are VERY intuitive, and it won’t take you but about 5 minutes to figure it all out. Getting songs from iTunes to iPod is as easy as plugging the iPod into the computer. iTunes will automatically launch and load all songs in its library into the iPod (if so configured; you can also set it up to manually update.)

Your iPod documentation will provide all the in-depth information, but trust me, it’s very easy.

4

Two words: Good tags. If you don’t have all your tags in order, iTunes is gonna be kinda sucky, since it uses them to sort songs. There is a nice little project for you while you wait for the weekend.

5

i thought my tags were good…i had to do that for my iriver…
does this mean im gonna have to go through my 60gb library and check every cd/ song??

that other program anapod…how does the tag thing work for that? can movies, pics, etc be synced with that program??

are there any other alternatives to itunes??(preferably free) thanks.

6

Yeah, good tags are an absolute must. iTunes (nor the iPod) doesn’t sort by filename. It’s all about the ID3 tags there, and if those are a mess, so too will your library be. I spent many, many hours editing ID3 tags in my library. Now I make sure that when I add a new album or song, the tags are edited before they’re copied to my iPod. Once you get into the habit it’s not so bad, it’s just that initial editing session that’s a pain. You only have to do it once, though.

The best advice I can offer, from personal experience (and having had to rebuild my list three times before I got wise and did it the right way), are these tips:

  1. Don’t just slap everything on your iPod directly. Keep it in your library, edit the tags in your library, and then copy from your library to your iPod. Hard drive space is cheap. The time it takes you to rebuild your collection and re-edit your tags when something buggers up is not. Trust me on this.

  2. Smart Playlists. Learn them. Use them. They are your friends and will save your ass from tedious hand-crafted categorization if something goes south. (It happens.) I used to manage my playlists by hand, but with several thousand songs on my iPod, this was a chore when my playlists suddenly disappeared. Smart playlists will do all the categorization for you based on the criteria you give it. This is where good ID3 tags are absolutely key. Artist, album, year, genre, all that good stuff is used by smart playlists to put everything in its proper place without you having to lift a finger. And if something screws up, remaking your smart playlists is a hell of a lot quicker than rebuilding hand-made ones. Now, smart playlists aren’t the be-all and end-all; there are just some playlists you’re going to want to make by hand because all of the songs you want in it don’t fit into an easily selected set of filters, but still – creating an 80s or 90s playlist, or a Rock or Dance playlist, or an 80s Rock playlist, or any of a number of such themed playlists is much easier with the smart playlists.

  3. If you are away from your house and don’t have access to your iTunes library but still have access to a PC and want to rip a CD you just bought, get yourself Floola. No installation required, has versions for Win, Mac and Linux, and can be stored and run right off your iPod so you can have access to an iTunes-like environment anywhere.

  4. If you want some album art, Discogs.com is where you want to get it. If you can’t find it there, Amazon often has good-sized album art you can snag. While we’re on the subject of album art, don’t bother putting the front, back, and any auxiliary art files in the same album. You won’t see anything but the first image on your iPod, so the only place you’ll have access to it is at home.

  5. If you want to mod your iPod by dual- or triple-booting iPod Linux and/or RockBox, install them first before you put any songs on the unit. They require that everything on the iPod be deleted before they can be installed. I do not reccommend trying either of these if you’re not familiar with Linux and aren’t comfortable altering your iPod’s firmware. If you don’t know what you’re doing the potential is there for you to be the proud owner of a shiny Apple-branded brick, so use your discretion.

  6. Buy good case. Seriously. You can scratch that nice, shiny front with a soft chamois or harsh words. Some people are partial to hard aluminum or plastic cases, but I can’t wrap my head around it. From a safety standpoint, the physics just don’t add up. Plastic cracks, shatters and scratches up. Both are hard and do the next best thing to nothing to diffuse the impact from a drop. (Aluminum cases usually have a soft lining, but it’s so thin it’s almost useless.) Soft rubber or silicone cases are better, but because they are form-fitting and therefore in direct contact with the iPod, there is still a good amount of force transmitted to the unit when dropped. Plus, they bounce. Bouncing is bad. I prefer leather cases myself. Leather buckles and spreads a good bit of the impact throughout the case itself which has a better chance of saving your expensive iPod from certain doom. Think of it like the crumple zone of a car, only without the need for Maaco afterwards. Remember, there’s a hard drive in that thing, and hard drives tend not to like sudden impacts very much.

  7. On the whole, Apple’s EQ presets, though numerous, suck, and there is no custom EQ on-board. This is not a tip, just a general gripe, especially when iTunes does have a custom EQ option.

  8. Good phones, man. That’s the key to getting the most out of the iPod. Apple’s buds suck. Consider a nice pair of Shure E3s or, if you can afford them, E4s or E5s. Sennheiser also make a good pair of in-ear monitors. IEMs are simply awesome. They cut off outside noise by 35-40dB, which means you don’t have to have the volume as loud when you’re in a noisy setting, and the fact that they only require a tiny air pocket to deliver good sound makes them much more efficient at their jobs, so they require less power to drive, which has the added benefit of not sucking as much power from your battery. (It’s minimal, but there it is all the same.) Plus, if you’re in a setting where you’ll be sitting next to other people (on a plane, a bus, a train, whatever) you’ll be less likely to disturb them when you’re cranking up the chunes because they leak far less sound than on-ear and/or open-air phones. Do NOT buy phones with active noise cancellation. These use electronics to try and “subtract” outside noise from the audio stream, and that can introduce annoying audio artifacts into the sound. Some people may not notice, but it sounds like crap to me.

There. Off the top of my head, those are my tips, for whatever they’re worth.

7

What is floola? Their site had virtually no information on what it actually did…

8

It’s a mobile iPod manager – kind of an iTunes Lite, except it’s mobile, so it can be stored and run right off the iPod itself without ever needing to be installed on the host computer. Plug iPod in to PC or Mac or Linux box, open iPod drive, run Floola, manage your iPod. You obviously don’t have access to your local PC’s library, but you can work with the iPod itself as if you were in iTunes.

9

thanks for all the tips mindfield!
this is gonna be a little more of a committment than i anticipated, but ill get used to it.

im not a hude playlist guy, so that shouldnt be too bad.
The case thing sucks…i like the way the ipod looks naked, i dont really want to dress it up…but we’ll see. what kind of case comes with it?

thanks again!

oh, one question. is it possible to hook my ipod up to another computer with itunes and put something off that computer onto my ipod(eg. music, movies) thanks!

10

If your music is in good enough shape for the Iriver just use File -> Add folder to libray. This will import you music and it should be pretty good from there.

There may be a few problems with duplicated songs on albums. I have not figured out why but it is not that big a deal. I had no other trouble getting our music on the wifes Ipod. I have all the music on my 40 gig Iriver.

11

Not all plastic cases are created equal. I have one of these for my Nano. I would use the term bullet proof to describe it.

12

Okay, granted, the Otterbox is nigh on indestructable, but I still question its shock absorption. This isn’t much of an issue for the flash-based iPods, but the hard-drive based ones need it.

In iTunes, click View->Show Duplicates. Problem solved. For me though, I’m a bit of an anal completionist, so if I have albums that duplicate a a particular song, I leave it that way. It just bugs me when there’s gaps in an album. This is especially true for electronica “in-the-mix” albums, where a missing song creates a disconcerting jump in the music flow.

You don’t have to pay attention to things like release year, album art, genre, or such things if you don’t plan on creating smart playlists that use them, so the task of editing ID3 tags doesn’t need to be that involved. One of the cool things about iTunes though is the ability to batch edit. You can select a whole album, for example, and right-click and select “show info” to edit all of the tags in that album at once that are going to be the same for each track – artist name, album name, year, genre, number of tracks, number of discs, etc. Once that’s done you can, if necessary, go back and edit one by one each track to change whatever is different for each song – like the song names, track numbers, disc numbers, etc. Saves a lot of time.

I like the way it looks “naked” too, but my desire for an esthetically pleasing unit is outweighed by my desire not to spend another $400 on a new iPod anytime soon because I killed or otherwise damaged my current one. Plus, there are some pretty sweet-looking cases out there. Check out cases by Sena, Krussel, and Covertec. They all make some very nice stuff. The iPod only comes with a cloth pouch. Pretty cheap of Apple if you ask me.

Yes. iTunes can handle multiple connected units and treat them all separately.

13

once again mindfiled, thank you. Your info will get me well on my way. thanks so much

14

You’re welcome. Two things I should have mentioned about connecting to someone else’s iTunes:

  • You will not be able to copy anything from the other person’s library unless they have configured iTunes to share their library.

  • You can copy songs to your iPod, but it doesn’t work in reverse. In order to copy songs from your iPod back to your PC, you will need an iPod backup program such as Anapod Explorer (which doubles as a complete replacement for iTunes itself) or CopyPod/CopyTrans. This is another area where at least minimally good tags are important. When music is copied to your iPod, the files get renamed to a seemingly random sequence of characters and stored on your iPod that way. iPod backup programs rely on the tag information of these songs in order to be able to recreate meaningful filenames. Otherwise there’s no telling what’s what.

15

While programs to copy songs off an Ipod are convenient You can easily copy the songs manually off the ipod. The music is in a hidden directory called music on the ipod. The only issue is that Itunes renames the songs to have some random number for a name. The tags are all still there so you can find the song you want. Explorer, the program most people use for looking at the contents of disks, will show all the major fields if you want.

16

I apologize profusely if I’m confusing this issue at all, but I think Mindfield may have answered a different question than the one that was being asked.

If I have understood unbrok3npp correctly, the question was, can he set up iTunes on one machine, copy files onto his iPod, then move the iPod to a second computer with iTunes and add additional music to the same iPod.

If that was indeed the question, then the answer is much more complicated. I believe there are ways to do it, but I haven’t done it personally and don’t have the expertise to try to tell you how. I just wanted to clarify based on what I was reading.

And now that I’ve gone back and finished reading the thread, I see now that the issue has already been addressed. Sorry.

17

This can still be done. If library sharing is enabled, your library can feed any number of iPods connected to the same PC – which means you can bring your iPod over to someone else’s house and, with sharing enabled, copy files from his library to your iPod. iTunes doesn’t care whose iPod is connected at the time unless the songs are DRMed with FairPlay (i.e. purchased from ITMS), in which case the DRMed songs can only be copied to the iPod that is licensed to use them. Licenses can be transferred from one user to another, but the transferring user (and therefore his iPod) loses the rights to play those songs.

18

yes, that actually is what i meant.
I my own pc and then a “home pc” both with some different stuff I want. The question is “can I get all the media off of both computers or do I need a dedicated machine?”

also, I am going to college this fall and will be getting a laptop. Will I have to do everything over again? thanks for everyones help

19

If you want to keep your library, you will need to copy the entire iPod library folder on to your laptop, and then install iTunes and import the library. (File->Import Library->Find library folder, select XML file) I had to do this last weekend when I had to redo my system from scratch (hard drive dying) and my iTunes library drive letter changed, so I just imported the library from the new drive and it worked fine.

20

thanks!
so im looking at what kind of case to buy. I dont want some heavy duty thing…but im looking at 2 cheaper options…one is a black silicone case and one is aluminum. Which do you think would be better? it doesnt seem like name brand really matters…