Our household desktop recently crashed, meaning we no longer (for a while) have access to a lot of the music stored on it. We do have all of that music on my wife’s ipod. Most of it is music we copied from CDs, only a few consists of songs we purchased from Itunes.
We also have 50 dollars worth of Itunes gift certificates we want to use.
We are computer literate, but itunes illiterate, hence the following question:
If we use our laptop to purchase music through itunes, then plug our ipod into that laptop, and “sync” it, will that simply add the new music to the ipod, or will it erase whatever’s on the ipod that’s not on the laptop (i.e. almost everything) before copying what’s on the laptop onto the ipod?
Basically, I don’t know what “sync” means in this context, and I’m afraid it means “make the contents of the two devices identical,” which I’m afraid implies that some contents may be deleted from one device or another.
It’ll erase everything. The solution is to use the “Transfer Purchases from ipod” feature under the File menu first. That’ll copy everything off of the ipod and onto the computer. Be sure to check that everything was downloaded before syncing, of course.
Wait until the computer that normally syncs with the ipod is fixed. This is the easiest solution.
Purchase new music on the laptop, sync, and just listen to the new stuff until the computer that normally syncs with the ipod is fixed. This is the second easiest option, with the potential downside that if the music on the broken computer can for some reason not be recovered, it’s gone.
Using a 3rd party program, transfer the iPod’s music to the working computer, then buy and sync to your heart’s content. This is the most complicated option: The laptop’s hard drive may not be able to hold the entire music library. You may have problems when you want to move the iPod back over to the desktop once it’s fixed.
That’s the default behavior, but it’s easy to turn off in iTunes by going to Preferences -> Devices and checking “Prevent iPods from syncing automatically.”
Then, you can plug your iPod into your laptop without fear of a sync erasing anything. You can then copy songs from your library manually by dragging them from the iTunes song list onto the icon for your iPod.
I’ve just been reminded that part of the reason we’re asking this is, we want to get all the organization into playlists to be moved from the ipod to the laptop. So the “don’t automatically sync” option is helpful, but not exactly what we were looking for.
It’s looking like we’re going to have to get third party software.
Yeah, I thought it did everything. I don’t know iTunes well enough. I’ve now managed to nuke my own music library seeing if that was right. You’ll have to use one of those sees-the-ipod-as-a-usb-drive programs. I used MediaMonkey once. That’s kind of overkill for this though, probably.
If it’s a Touch, is there a reason you’re not purchasing the music directly on the device? That would seem to solve the problem with being able to listen to both current music and new music you want to purchase.
It doesn’t seem like you have full freedom to edit playlists on the thing–or if you do, she hasn’t seen how to do so yet. (I haven’t taken a look at that myself.)
I just bought igadget for twenty bucks. Seems to be doing the trick.